Bergen County man sues Montvale mayor over Facebook block, citing free speech
The lawsuit could test when elected officials can block critics on social media and when doing so violates the First Amendment.
A Bergen County man is accusing a New Jersey mayor of violating the First Amendment after the mayor blocked him from a Facebook page used to discuss town business and local policy.
The lawsuit, filed in Bergen County Superior Court, alleges that Montvale Mayor Mike Ghassali silenced a critic, Howard Fredrics, by deleting comments and banning him from the page following a series of disagreements over local issues.
The case highlights a growing legal question across the country: when elected officials use social media to discuss government matters, can they block critics who challenge them?
Fredrics, an award-winning composer, sound designer, and audio engineer who also runs Park Ridge’s local public access TV station, called the Republican mayor’s move “disappointing” and said he believed Ghassali would want to hear different opinions, not just those that agree with him.
“He was absolutely free to say, ‘I disagree, and here’s why,’” the 63-year-old Frederics told The Jersey Vindicator. “But it seems like he doesn’t tolerate dissent.”
The attorney for Frederics, Lawrenceville-based Kathleen Redpath-Perez, reinforced that argument in a brief accompanying the March 3 lawsuit filed in Bergen County Superior Court in Hackensack.
“Disagreement with government policy is protected speech,” Redpath-Perez wrote. “A public official may not open a forum for discussion of official matters and then exclude a critic while permitting supporters to speak.”
The case tests the bounds of a still-evolving legal gray area regarding when politicians can block users on social media. Much of the issue depends on how the official framed the purpose of the account.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that an official who has authority to speak on the state’s behalf and does so on social media may violate the First Amendment if they ban comments.
But officials also retain a personal right to comment on public issues. If they are not speaking for the state, they can block users.
“The Supreme Court emphasized that deciding whether there’s a First Amendment violation may require a case-by-case, post-by-post examination,” Ken Paulson of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University wrote on the school’s website. “Public officials can save themselves, and the courts, time and trouble by maintaining separate accounts and keeping the content distinct.”
Liza Weinberg, supervising attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said cases like this often hinge on details. But generally, if a politician uses social media to communicate on behalf of the government, they cannot censor critics simply because they disagree.
“When viewpoints are excluded because they’re disfavored, it really limits the power of public debate,” Weinberg told The Jersey Vindicator. “It’s our exercise of our First Amendment freedoms that allows us to hold government officials accountable. As soon as we start censoring those voices, our democracy suffers.”
Frederics has argued Ghassali was clearly speaking in his role as mayor. He cited the use of the town logo, the mayor’s official email address, and a link to the borough website.
“All of that stuff makes it very official,” Frederics said. “The page’s contents are nearly 100% Montvale business.”
Ghassali’s page features an American flag alongside the Borough of Montvale seal, a link to the borough website, and the mayor’s official email address. Most posts focus on town events or local political issues.
The page header describes Ghassali as a “proud mayor serving his community to the best of his ability.”
Frederics said Ghassali also maintains a separate personal Facebook account. In the lawsuit, he asks the court to order the mayor to unblock him and prevent him from blocking critics in the future.
“It’s the modern equivalent of the public square, and [Ghassali] is making announcements and pronouncements of official public policy and decisions,” Frederics said. “People should feel free to engage when it is a page run by a public official in his official capacity, which I believe this was.”
When asked about the issue, Ghassali told The Vindicator In a March 11 email that he could not comment because he had not been served with the lawsuit.
But in a March 2025 letter to Frederics’ attorney, borough counsel David Lafferty disputed Frederics’ claims.
“I gather your client has not shared with you what he actually posted on the Facebook page named ‘Mayor Mike Ghassali,’” Lafferty wrote. “His comments were both false and argumentative and were taken down for those reasons.”
The town maintains its own official account, he added, while Ghassali’s page is a “personal, political social media page” used to advance the mayor’s political goals.
“It is not intended to be the official social media page for the Borough of Montvale,” he wrote.
‘The window dressing of democracy’
The dispute began in December 2024 during a still-unexplained wave of drone sightings that flooded the Garden State’s skies for weeks.
As speculation spread about the drones’ origins, public officials sought to calm residents who worried that Iran or another foreign power had invaded U.S. airspace.
Around that time, Ghassali declared an emergency no-fly zone over Montvale, an affluent town of fewer than 10,000 residents near the New York border.
The Dec. 13 announcement drew national attention and several cable news appearances for Ghassali, a longtime Republican politician who unsuccessfully sought his party’s nomination to challenge U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer in 2020.
Frederics questioned whether the mayor even had the authority to issue such a declaration and worried it could prompt someone to try to shoot down a drone.
“Should some nutcase decide to follow Mayor Ghassali’s declaration of a ‘No-Fly Zone’ by attempting to bring down one of these crafts, they could certainly end up causing harm when they crash into homes, businesses, or onto individuals,” he wrote, according to screenshots included in the lawsuit.
Frederics also accused Ghassali of exploiting the drone panic to boost his political profile.
“This mayor appears to be grandstanding for political gain, in a quest for higher political office,” Frederics wrote. “Last time he tried to run for higher office, he lost. This sort of fearmongering and blatant disregard for federal law should be reason alone to deny him such an opportunity.”
A month later, Ghassali posted that Montvale would raise the American flag to full mast for Donald Trump’s inauguration, even though the nation was still observing a mourning period following the death of former President Jimmy Carter.
Frederics argued that only the president or the governor could likely make such a declaration.
Later in January 2025, Ghassali posted immigration statistics that Frederics again disputed, the lawsuit said.
“He said immigration in general was costing taxpayers money, and I disagreed with that view,” Frederics said.
A little more than a month later, Frederics visited the mayor’s Facebook page again but discovered he had been blocked.
After several exchanges with borough officials, the borough attorney informed Frederics on April 2 that the mayor would not restore his access.
The lawsuit says Ghassali later added a disclaimer calling the account his “personal page to share information.”
In September, Ghassali allegedly changed the page’s category from “government official” to “public service.”
Still, Frederics said he will continue pursuing the case.
“You can’t ban a member of the public from coming to speak before [the Borough Council] because they might disagree with you,” he said. “This is no different.”
“I think it’s quite dangerous for a public official to be able to silence the voices of dissent,” he added. “Because then you only have a single point of view, the one that agrees with that official. And that’s not really democracy. That’s the window dressing of democracy without true democratic input from the people.”
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Steve Janoski is a multi-award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Bergen Record and the Asbury Park Press. His reporting has exposed corruption, government malfeasance and police misconduct