The Sheriff’s Office quit Facebook after a lawsuit. Ten years later, it’s back online.

The Sheriff’s Office is back on Facebook, more than a decade after it quit the platform in the face of a lawsuit challenging it for deleting unfavorable comments and blocking critics.

The department has been accessible on social media — it has accounts on X (more than 78,000 followers) and Instagram (upwards of 35,000 followers), and it posts items on Nextdoor. The content ranges from lighthearted attaboys to evacuation notices during fast-moving wildfires. But the return to Facebook gives the department an audience that may not be on those other platforms.

“Our return to Facebook is about more than just a social media presence — it’s about adding another method of communication with the public we serve,” Sheriff Kelly Martinez said in a statement Thursday. “We are committed to listening, informing and strengthening partnerships that help keep our neighborhoods safe and connected.”

Martinez also noted that this year marks the department’s 175th anniversary. “What better way to strengthen our commitment to transparency, outreach, and public safety than by reconnecting with the community on Facebook,” she said in a statement. “We look forward to more positive dialogue and community engagement on social media.”

The Sheriff’s Office left Facebook in 2014 amid a federal lawsuit in San Diego filed by an Oceanside gun parts dealer, who alleged the department had violated his First Amendment free speech right by deleting two Facebook posts critical of then-Sheriff Bill Gore. The department also banned the man from making future comments.

In the middle of that court battle, the department told the court that it had permanently closed its Facebook account, citing the “time, expense and hassle” of enforcing department policies regarding comments. The federal case was dropped a few months later.

In an email Friday, sheriff’s spokesperson Lt. David Collins said that history was part of the discussions when considering whether to restart the page. But he said the discussion was primarily “focused on improving the community and department experience with our second launch.”

Collins said the decision to return was about reconnecting with the Facebook community, whose members may not be on the other social media platforms the department uses.

“We have a new sheriff, and Sheriff Martinez wants to respond to the community and her own organization’s requests to re-launch on this platform,” he said.

Gore left office in early 2022. Martinez was elected to the job later that year.

The lieutenant said the department knows it has its critics and “we hope there will be room for constructive dialogue. We may not always respond to criticisms on this platform, but we won’t remove them.”

Nor, he said, does the department remove criticism on other social media platforms.

Attorney David Loy of the First Amendment Coalition, which advocates for free speech, said Friday that government agencies are not required to have a social media page with open comments — but if they do have one and allow people to comment, that is considered a public forum subject to the First Amendment.

“The most fundamental rule under the First Amendment is if once the government opens a forum for speech, it cannot discriminate against people based on the viewpoint of what they have to say,” he said. “So it can’t delete or remove comments or block people just because it objects to the viewpoint.”

There can be limitations, he said, perhaps as to subject matter. And a threat of harm is not protected speech.

The region has seen a handful of challenges over deleted or blocked social media comments in local politics, but most of those have involved individual members of governing bodies. National City Mayor Ron Morrison was sued in 2018 by a union leader who alleged the mayor blocked his comments on Facebook. Former Encinitas Mayor Catherine Blakespear was challenged by several people who accused her of blocking users on her Facebook page used for her mayoral campaign.

Last year, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public officials can sometimes be sued for blocking their critics on social media. The ruling arose in part from a local case in which two parents sued two Poway Unified School District trustees who had blocked them from social media pages the two trustees used to communicate with constituents.