A Poway resident has sued the city in federal court, claiming officials repeatedly hid his critical comments on the city's official Facebook page while leaving similar remarks from other users untouched. Ray Jalisi filed the lawsuit October 16 alleging the hidden comments amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of his First Amendment rights.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Jalisi's suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in downtown San Diego, says his comments were hidden from other users several times during the past year. Jalisi also presented evidence that identical comments from other users remained visible while his were hidden.
A Bot Flag, Not a Ban, City Says
The City of Poway has offered a technical explanation rather than a denial of intent. In a statement reported October 28, the city said Facebook's own Moderation Assist tool — not a city employee — hid Jalisi's comments after flagging his profile as a “non-human bot” account.
Court filings note that Jalisi's Facebook profile has no profile picture, only one friend, and no posts of its own — the kind of sparse account the automated tool is designed to catch. The city has said its employees did not hide or remove Jalisi's comments.
Judge Grants Partial Relief, Rejects the Rest
Jalisi's lawsuit sought a temporary restraining order against what his filing characterized as shadow banning, along with injunctive relief. On October 22, the court mostly rejected that TRO request, according to the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, finding a First Amendment violation appeared unlikely on the record before it. The court determined the automated restriction was content-neutral and survived intermediate scrutiny at this preliminary stage.
Even so, the judge did not leave Jalisi empty-handed. The order directed Poway to restore the public visibility of every comment by Jalisi that had been hidden on the city's official Facebook page, and it barred the city from hiding, deleting, or otherwise suppressing his future comments based on their viewpoint. The city said it had not opposed most of the restraining order request, noting it had never manually hidden any of his comments.
Jalisi's Attorney and Poway's Policy
Alex Coolman is Jalisi's attorney.
Poway's social media policy defines its presence on platforms like Facebook as a limited public forum, under which the city reserves the right to delete posts containing abusive, vulgar, threatening, or deliberately untruthful content, and to block accounts for disruptive or suspected spam activity.
Part of a Broader Legal Pattern
The case lands amid a string of disputes nationally over when officials' social media moderation crosses a constitutional line. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court sent a separate case involving Poway Unified School District trustees — who had blocked parents after frequent critical comments — back to the Ninth Circuit for reconsideration under a new state-action standard, as reported by KPBS Public Media. That same term, the justices also decided Lindke v. Freed, a case involving a city manager who deleted comments and blocked a user on a Facebook account mixing personal and official posts, according to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Jalisi's case differs in one key respect: the hiding mechanism at issue is an automated bot-detection tool built into Facebook itself, not a direct human decision by a city employee to block or delete. Whether that distinction holds up as the litigation proceeds remains to be seen, but for now, the preliminary order stands — Poway must restore Jalisi's previously hidden comments and refrain from viewpoint-based suppression as the case moves toward a possible trial.
