Clallam County Superior Court’s official Facebook presence has remained offline for nearly two weeks, following its abrupt removal from the social media platform.
Internal correspondence recently obtained indicates that the page’s disappearance resulted from an urgent effort by court staff to suppress public interaction and eliminate specific imagery after local residents began posting unsolicited remarks.
On the morning of February 13, shortly after the court stopped filtering user comments, Deputy Court Administrator Kaysey Clayton sent a priority message to the Clallam County IT Department. Clayton expressed frustration that she lacked the access rights to stop the commenting feature herself and asked IT staff to halt all public input immediately. She requested that she, Court Administrator Lacey Halberg, and Presiding Judge Simon Barnhart be alerted once the shutdown was finalized.
Dean Anderson, an IT Systems Analyst, responded by explaining that there was no standard method to disable comments globally across the page. Instead of a total shutdown, Anderson recommended that the court continue to manage the page through active moderation, including removing problematic comments, blocking frequent posters, and using automated filters.
When a complete ban on comments proved difficult to execute, court officials focused on deleting particular visual content. Halberg reached out to IT regarding specific images on the page. Anderson identified these as part of a January 9, 2025, post announcing the swearing-in of Commissioner Elizabeth Stanley as a judge. Since individual photos within a multi-image post could not be removed in isolation, Anderson advised that the entire post be deleted, a move that would also erase all comments attached to that specific update.
During this exchange, IT personnel shared a portion of Clallam County Policy 420, Section 9.4, which governs social media usage. The policy grants the county the authority to restrict or delete content at any time without prior warning and bans posts described as vulgar, offensive, threatening, harassing, anonymous, or profane.
Critics argue that this policy may be unconstitutionally broad. By prohibiting speech that is merely "offensive" or "profane," the rules potentially suppress the robust political and personal debate that citizens are protected by the First Amendment to engage in when discussing government actions that provoke strong reactions.
Instead of addressing First Amendment considerations or tolerating criticism directed at court figures, including former Court Commissioner Brian Parker, the court opted for the most drastic measure. The public forum has now been completely dismantled, leaving residents without a digital channel to interact with the court.