NEW ORLEANS — The city of New Orleans has agreed to change its social media policy for employees after settling a free-speech lawsuit filed last year by two public library workers against the city, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her top deputy, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño.
Andrew Okun and Erin Wilson filed their lawsuit last year, alleging city Policy 83(R), issued by Montaño in July 2020, was an unconstitutional effort to control what employees said in their free time, on public social media channels like Tik Tok and even on private messaging services like Slack.
Last week, the city issued a revised Policy 83(R). It drops references to what employees can say in private messaging apps on their own time and removes vague directives, such as "avoid the offensive" or "do not engage or respond to negative or disparaging posts about city departments, employees or policies."
Okun, who still works for the city library system, says he feels vindicated.
“Generally speaking, when you have a city administration going out of its way to silence its own workers, that's a bad sign,” he said. “And I think our case pointed to that. That's why we fought, and that's why we won.”
Wilson was particularly concerned about the previous policy because they are transgender, post regularly on Tik Tok and once appeared with their face obscured in a WWL-TV report to speak out against Cantrell’s initial plan to keep public libraries open to visitors in the early days of the pandemic.
Wilson has left the library system to teach in a local high school, but was thrilled by the policy change, even though it no longer applies to them.
“For a long time, I felt like it was impossible to effect meaningful change,” Wilson said. “This experience showed me it is possible. And it feels empowering. It doesn’t matter that I’m a teacher now.”
Cantrell’s administration issued a statement Thursday saying it changed the policy to “provide guidance that addresses concerns of inappropriate disclosure of nonpublic information, ensures employees are not subject to workplace harassment, and protects the privacy rights of city employees and citizens, all while respecting our employees’ rights to free expression."
But Katie Schwartzmann, a Tulane Law School professor and the former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, represented Okun and Wilson in their lawsuit, and said she had never seen a policy “that goes this far in regulating private activity of all city workers.”