Blocked from the mayor's page

If the mayor blocks you on Facebook, you stop seeing what she posts as mayor — the meetings, the closures, the announcements — and you cannot reply to any of it. Facebook never tells you it happened.

In April 2024 the City of Troy claimed:

Our pages must be made available to everyone, regardless of their personal opinions… People should not be punished for that.

The statement was a lie. The administration that issued it blocks residents who criticise it from the official account carrying the mayor’s title, and the city can produce no policy governing any of it. What else has gone out over those channels since is covered in “Our pages must be made available to everyone”.

The same page, two answers

On September 14, 2026 the page at facebook.com/CMforTroy returned two different things depending on who was asking.

Signed out, it loads. The title is “Mayor Carmella R. Mantello.” The category is “Public figure.” It has 25,000 followers and follows 197 accounts. The Intro reads: “It is an honor to serve as your Mayor. Each day, I remain committed to building a safer, cleaner Troy and improving the quality of life for all of our residents!” The most recent post is a remembrance ceremony at 9-11 Park. The listed links are an Instagram account, carmella4troy.com, and twitter.com/CMantello.

Signed in, the same address returns: “This content isn’t available right now.”

Facebook does not tell a blocked user they have been blocked. That message is what it shows instead. The account receiving it belongs to a Troy resident, and it is not the only one. Residents have reported being blocked from the page.

Nobody wrote down who speaks for the city

On August 30, 2026 a records request asked the City of Troy who runs its social media accounts, what policies govern their use, and which accounts it treats as official channels of the Mayor’s Office.

The city answered the next day.

A diligent search of City records returned no results relative to your request.

Two things follow from that answer.

The policy announced in April 2024 is not a record the city holds. A request for any policy governing content on city social media, covering January 1, 2024 to the present, returned nothing.

And the city has never written down which accounts speak for the Office of the Mayor. No record identifies them, and no record identifies who has the keys to the ones it runs.

The state has already answered this, about this county

In 2019 the New York State Committee on Open Government was asked whether the list of accounts blocked by a Rensselaer County official was a public record. The official was the County Executive, and the question covered both his government account and his personal one.

In our opinion, records that reflect Twitter usernames blocked under the official @RenscoExecutive Twitter account are records maintained by the County and would be required to be disclosed in response to a FOIL request.

A blocked list is a record because FOIL defines a record as “any information kept, held, filed, produced or reproduced by, with or for an agency,” and the list sits in the account’s own settings. The opinion adds that no exemption is likely to cover it: disclosing a username would not cause the harms the statute is written to prevent.

The personal-account question is the one that reaches facebook.com/CMforTroy.

If [the official] ever uses his personal Twitter account for County government business, the record of blocked Twitter usernames would be a record subject to rights of access conferred by FOIL since it would likely be impossible to separate usernames that were blocked for personal or political reasons from those that may have been blocked for a County sanctioned purpose.

The test is “ever,” not “mostly.” The page carries the office in its title, an Intro written in the voice of the officeholder, and posts of the mayor’s official appearances. On that test the list of people it has blocked is a public record, and the city has to produce it.

Blocking a resident from a government account is a First Amendment problem

A private citizen can block whoever they like. A government account cannot — shutting someone out of it is the government silencing a critic, which the First Amendment forbids.

In 2024 the Supreme Court decided unanimously (Lindke v. Freed) where the line falls: an official’s page counts as government when the official had authority to speak for the government there and was using it that way. The Court wrote the test for exactly this kind of page — one that is neither plainly the city’s nor plainly hers.

The Court also said blocking is worse than deleting a comment. Deleting removes one post; blocking shuts the person out of everything on the page, including the parts that are unmistakably official business.

The case people remember is Trump blocking critics on Twitter, which a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional in 2019. That ruling was later wiped when he left office, so it does not bind anyone. Lindke does.

What the record shows

Mayor Carmella Mantello supports censorship.

The page carrying her title and written in her voice blocks residents who criticise her. It is the account where she speaks as Mayor of Troy, and the people it shuts out are constituents who questioned what she was doing. That is the whole of it: an elected official using an official channel to silence the people she governs.

The 2024 statement was a lie. Her administration put out a press release saying the city’s pages “must be made available to everyone, regardless of their personal opinions” and that “people should not be punished for that.” It made her look like the corrective to a predecessor who blocked fifty-plus residents. She now does the same thing, from the page that carries her name and the office.

Asked in August 2026 for any policy governing content on city social media, the city produced nothing. Asked which accounts it treats as official channels of the Mayor’s Office, it produced nothing. Asked who holds administrator access to the accounts it runs, it produced nothing. The principle announced in 2024 exists in a press release and nowhere else — no policy behind it, no record of the unblocking it claimed, and no rule stopping her from blocking whoever she likes.

Facebook notifies no one when it happens. The city announces nothing. A resident finds out when the page stops loading.