This month the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) updated its offender handbook (PDF) to stipulate that inmates are not allowed to have social media accounts. While blog posts are still permitted, a spokesperson for the TDCJ told Ars that the rule was developed to get social media platforms to comply with the corrections department’s takedown requests more readily.

Since Texas inmates are not allowed Internet access, this rule applies to social media accounts managed by friends or family. As Fusion explains , "Prisoners write posts, send them to a friend or family member through snail mail, and ask the friend to post them on Facebook.” If an inmate is caught having a friend or family member update an account for them, they’re charged with a "level three violation,” which TDCJ characterizes as the lowest level of violation in the Texas prison system.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, says that level three violations can result in loss of privileges, extra work duty, or confinement to an inmate’s cell for up to 45 days. The EFF objects to the new rules in Texas, arguing that "a person does not lose all of their rights to participate in public discourse when they are incarcerated… This policy would not only prohibit the prisoners’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, but also prevent the public from exercising their First Amendment rights to gather information about the criminal justice system from those most affected by it.” The TDCJ had no response to the EFF’s argument.

In an e-mail to Ars, TDCJ spokesperson Jason Clark noted that the new rules did not apply to blog posts written by inmates. “The rule is specific to active social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc," he wrote. “Those companies have mechanisms in place that allow us to request that the pages be deactivated. Private Web pages don’t have a mechanism to request they be taken down and we cannot force them to comply.”

Clark clarified for Ars that the rule was put in place in part to appease social media companies that balked at the idea of taking down a social media account without a rule in place to force their hand in compliance. “Recently when we have asked that accounts be deactivated, increasingly we have found that the social media company would come back and indicate they would not do so because the agency did not have a rule prohibiting offenders from having social media accounts.” With a rule in place, however, social media companies are more willing to meet the correctional system’s demand.

Last June, the EFF obtained e-mails sent between prisons and Facebook that suggested that the social media site routinely took down accounts managed by inmates or in the name of inmates, despite asserting to the EFF that Facebook was not interested in being responsible for "enforcing prison regulations that ban inmates from having social media profiles or accessing the Internet.” When Ars contacted the company today, Facebook declined to comment. Ars also contacted Twitter for a response as to whether the site would remove a Twitter account on behalf of a prison’s request, even if the account isn’t abusive or threatening. Twitter declined to comment.

The TDCJ has maintained that “Offenders have used social media accounts to sell items over the Internet based on the notoriety of their crime, harass victims or victim’s families, and continue their criminal activity.” Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter already forbid harassment as part of their terms and conditions.

Other states have similar bans on social media. Alabama, for example, prohibits inmates from using any site that allows users to create personal profile pages or “offers a mechanism for communication among users, such as a forum, chat room, electronic mail, or instant messaging.” According to Fusion, inmates in Maine aren’t allowed to keep personal blogs, and South Carolina inmates are punished with solitary confinement if they’re caught using Facebook.

Update: Ars added that Facebook declined to comment on this story after publication.