The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to an appeal from two San Diego-area school administrators deciding whether government officials who take to social media are free to block their critics.

The question is whether their Facebook or Twitter accounts are private and personal, or instead become public platforms when officials use them to speak on public matters.

Former President Trump faced a similar lawsuit when he blocked critics from his Twitter account, losing in a New York federal appeals court that said he violated their right to free speech. But that case was dismissed before the Supreme Court could rule because Trump had left office.

Now the judges will rule on the issue in a case brought by two parents in Poway,

California a city in the San Diego area,

who regularly reached out to members of the school board to “raise concerns about important topics such as mismanagement and racial bullying”.

Christopher and Kimberly Garnier grew up there, graduated from public schools and had three children in school.

But two school board members Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and TJ Zane decided they’d seen enough of what they described as “repetitive and unresponsive comments” from the couple. Their lawyer told the court: “Christopher made the same comment on 42 different messages from OConnor-Ratcliff and the same reply on 226 of her tweets.”

When the two board members blocked the Garniers from their Facebook and Twitter accounts, the Garniers sued in federal court for violation of rights under the First Amendment.

They won in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said board members had turned their social media accounts into a public forum.

“They invested their pages with the authority of their office and used their pages to communicate about their official duties,” Judge Marsha Berzon said.

The board members urged the Supreme Court to hear their case and overturn the 9th Circuit’s decision. They argued that they were expressing their personal views on social media and that their Facebook or Twitter accounts were not speaking on behalf of the school districts.

Their appeal also argued that a ruling in favor of the Garniers “will have the unintended consequence of reducing speech as government officials’ social media pages are flooded with harassment, trolling and hate speech, which officials have no way of filtering out.”

The court said it would hear the O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier case in the fall.