A lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday accuses state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway of violating the free-speech rights of Arkansans whom the senator blocked on Twitter and Facebook.

The lawsuit is the first legal test in Arkansas over the right of constituents to interact with lawmakers online.

Similar questions are already circling around President Donald Trump, a prolific Twitter user who was told by a federal judge in New York earlier this year that blocking people on the platform violated their rights.

That decision is being appealed, though The New York Times reported in June that the Twitter users who had sued the president were unblocked by the White House. The president has millions of followers on social media.

Rapert, a three-term Republican incumbent, has more than 24,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 9,000 followers on Twitter.

According to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, four people claiming to be atheists said they were blocked from participating in discussions of Rapert's public social media pages after posting comments critical of the senator. Rapert is the founder of Holy Ghost Ministries in Conway.

Another plaintiff to the suit, American Atheists Inc., also operates Facebook and Twitter pages, but had not been blocked by Rapert, according to the complaint.

"Defendant Stanley Jason Rapert has repeatedly deleted the comments of critics and restricted the participation of individuals critical of his statements and policy positions in public forums on social media such as Facebook and Twitter," the complaint states.

In an interview Tuesday, Rapert called the lawsuit frivolous and "very politically motivated." He said he was hiring an attorney. He said the suit had no merit because his accounts on Facebook and Twitter -- which are free services -- are not government funded. Constituents, he added, can always contact him through his state email.

"Jason Rapert is not the government," the senator said. "I'm an individual citizen who also happens to be a citizen legislator."

In one case outlined in the complaint, Rapert allegedly banned Betty Jo Fernau of Conway less than 24 hours after she replied to a post on Rapert's Facebook page with two of her own posts that annotated several passages from the Bible and espoused her belief in the separation of church and state.

Fernau's comments came in response to a post in which Rapert criticized a Little Rock judge's 2014 decision to permit same-sex marriages.

Another plaintiff, Catherine Shoshone of Maumelle, sent at least five tweets over a nine-month period responding to Rapert before he blocked her in February 2015, according to the lawsuit. Shoshone's tweets questioned claims Rapert made about religion and criticized him for taking campaign contributions from tobacco companies. One tweet posted a photo "selfie" of Rapert, in response to a tweet in which Rapert criticized former President Barack Obama for taking selfies.

The other plaintiffs in the case are Robert Barringer of Conway and Karen Dempsey of Rogers. The city of Conway is almost entirely within Rapert's district, Senate District 35, while Maumelle and Rogers are in other districts. Rapert said he did not know any of the plaintiffs personally.

Rapert's public Facebook page warns that uses who engage in "bullying, intimidation, personal attacks, use profanity or attempts to mislead others with false information" will be banned. The lawsuit alleges, however, that Rapert does not apply those rules to conservative users, citing as evidence posts calling U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., a "domestic terrorist" and a "cow," and another post encouraging someone to burn down a Virginia restaurant that refused to serve Trump's spokesman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

"There is no way I can sit there and police every comment," Rapert said Tuesday. He added that he bans users as he comes across objectionable posts, and denied keeping a "watch list" of users under the threat of a ban, as alleged in the complaint.

The attorney for the plaintiffs, Matthew Campbell, also runs the left-leaning political blog Blue Hog Report, which is often critical of Republican politicians.

Campbell referred comment to American Atheists' legal and policy director Alison Gill, who accused Rapert of trying to silence people whose views and religious beliefs he disagreed with.

"There was no improper behavior on a part of any of these people, so they were definitely blocked because of their views," Gill said.

The case was assigned to the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker.

Metro on 10/03/2018