A court has ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter.
Last July, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on behalf of seven individuals arguing that blocking users on the @realDonaldTrump account who disagreed with the president’s policies violated freedom of speech.
The blocked plaintiffs are Maryland professor Philip Cohen, Tennessee Dr. Eugene Gu, Seattle songwriter Holly Figueroa, New York comedy writer Nicholas Pappas, Pittsburgh author Joseph Papp, D.C. legal analyst Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and Houston police officer Brandon Neely.
“When I found out the president blocked me, it felt as though my opinion didn’t matter,” Neely said last year. “After devoting five years of my life to serving this country, the president — who is supposed to represent the views of all Americans — did not care what I had to say.”
I say bravo, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald. Elected officials should have keep their social media open to everyone that pays their salary.
I’m looking at you, all you DFL reps that blocked me – most of them without having ever engaged with me.
More to come.
As is his wont, iowahawk explains this whole stupid kerfuffle in his typical elegant and humorous way: Get ready, public officials: your days of illegally hiding from my fart jokes are OVER
But even more amusing is the unintended consequence of this. Lawsuits!
Technically, Trump blocks nobody; Twitter performs the blocking function based on its app. If Trump cannot block people w/o violating First Amendment, how can Twitter block people w/o violating First Amendment?
I agree with you 100% on this, Mitch. And frankly I applaud you standing up for free speech and that public officials have to be made to remain open to dissent. I wonder whether the President will ever live up to this ideal. Remember, though, that one of the solutions which the judge suggested to the President’s lawyer was to simply mute certain people (which I assume means mute them on a subject) – the Prez wasn’t buying it but it means it’s likely you could be muted on a subject if you were too prolific or said things which were found to be offensive, etc..
I know many people who get blocked on social media by politicians. I was thinking the same thing-
Well, now that we have precedent, anyone up for a law suit against Princess Cano?
Oof, my brilliant comment, that involved fart jokes, is in moderation purgatory. Are fart jokes now to be restricted? Censured? What is this? Nazi MN?
/sarc for the gullible
I may have to create a Twitter account just to live inside Keith Ellison’s head. Oh, the fun you can have trolling all those liberal followers with Ellison unable to block you! Nirvana!
While I can agree that the ex-officio account of politicians needs to be open, I don’t feel that the ruling is appropriate to the personal account of someone who is also an elected politician. If Betty McCollum doesn’t want me viewing her personal account, that is fine with me, but her official US Congressional account should be open to me. Same rules for Trump, Ellison, or whomever.
Teh Peevee mewled: “I agree with you 100% on this, Mitch. And frankly I applaud you standing up for free speech..”
Super duper. Does that mean I can shoot over to your penis blog and shred what ever incoherant amphigory you and your fellow 1/4 wits have posted lately?
LMAO.
You pathetic little man.
[Cue Jeopardy theme]
Twitter is not a one-way government propaganda tool. And free speech cuts both ways.
Trump would never pass any test that tries to separate his personal account from his official one.
Typical reaction from Penny. Applauds any ruling or attack against a conservative, but won’t call out his lefty heroes for doing the same thing. Ah, it must be bliss living in the land of leprechauns and unicorns.
Twitter is not a one-way government propaganda tool. And free speech cuts both ways.
Twitter is notorious for banning users w/o explanation & without recourse. They often do not respond to people who have been banned and are trying to find out why.
If facebook, youtube, and twitter were telephone companies, callers would suddenly find their phones inoperable, or that they couldn’t call certain numbers or receive calls from certain numbers. They would never be told this, they would have to figure it out for themselves, and any questions to the phone company would be messages left & not returned.
I know where this Lefty urge to censor and control the political conversation comes from. The offender is the undergraduate humanities programs at public and private universities. For decades they have taught that freedom is a political construct, and it is a zero sum game. If you are oppressed, it is because the law and the culture oppresses you. You can only gain your freedom by making those who oppress you less free. This is the language they speak, it is what they teach undergrads. All your talk about the constitution and the bill of rights is just another means of oppression. If the constitution and the bill of rights are tools of oppression, you oppose the constitution and the bill of rights.
In the wake of the Ta Nahesi Coates-Kanye dust up, Coates referred to “Black freedom.” This is out of the textbook of colonial studies. “White freedom” is the means of oppressing non-whites. “Black freedom” is the means of fighting “white freedom.” “Black freedom” may not look like freedom at all, it may mean tyranny, secret police, confiscation of property, imprisonment without charges. It certainly does not mean one man one vote and equality under the law.
News Flash!
BREAKING: Hawaiian judge blocks Trump’s cancellation of Kim Jong-un summit
Woolly: I still don’t think Trump understands the difference between his role as a government employee and a private citizen.
As a government employee, he works for us and all his correspondence and “tweets” and whatever else he communicates as president belong to us, the American taxpayer.
He claims to be one of the smartest people around, but he sure is slow when it comes to figuring out the difference between working for the public and working for himself.
jdm: Any way you slice it what has gone wrong here is attributable to a lack of sophistication in the White House. We all know Kim is a loose cannon but those who understand him the best, the Chinese and South Koreans, managed to broker this amazing opportunity, admittedly when Tillerson was still around, to find a diplomatic way out of escalating tensions. So far so good. Very good in fact. Except when it comes to crunch time the Trump administration has screwed it up.
In these circumstances North Korea’s interpretation of what disarmament means is correct and only a five star moron would think otherwise. Trump is clearly the worst negotiator in the world.
Emery, you are in Ruth Marcus territory. Marcus has made it clear that even when Trump enacts policies she favors, he did the wrong thing and catastrophe will result (famously Marcus has played this card with Trump’s move of the American embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem).
Can you imagine the value of those commemorative Summit coins with Trump and Kim?
And it looks like the Norks want to come back to the table. That didn’t take long. As I wrote earlier, it is a foible of the left to believe that in foreign policy, the US is always trying to fill an inside straight and the other guy is holding four aces.
“You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.” ~ Donald J Trump
If this isn’t essentially a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, I don’t know what would be.
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Emery, what happened to your team’s horror of “nuclear winter”? Honestly, there’s nothing in that statement that a sane person wouldn’t agree with.
And yes, Trump understands negotiation. Good God, every car salesman must look at you as their meal ticket. The first rule of negotiation is that you have to realize when you’re getting a bad deal and be willing to walk away when the deal is worse than no deal. Trump realizes just who needs the deal, and, unlike Obama’s Iran “deal” (“gift” is more accurate), he’s not willing to make a deal that makes the situation *worse* than when it started.
Trump has reduced you to snark, Emery. Your personal animus towards Trump has made you . . . unsteady. As for me, I am as ready as can be for whatever the future holds.
Now if you could only rid yourself of the dreaded ‘Obama Kenyan Mind Control’ (which forces you to think incorrect things) you’d be on the path to better mental health as well.
“Obama” is not mentioned at all in MBerg’s post and is mentioned just twice in the comments, once by yourself, Emery, and once by nerdbert. Nerdbert’s mention of Obama was used to contrast Obama’s negotiating style versus Trump’s negotiating style. For some reason, you mentioned “Obama” in connection with “mind control.”
You have a long demonstrated history of Obama Derangement Syndrone. I’m concerned for you. Carry on….
As a government employee, he works for us and all his correspondence and “tweets” and whatever else he communicates as president belong to us, the American taxpayer.
Emery, no one is blocked from accessing those tweets. All any one of those members of the perpetually-offended/-offending class needs to do is log out of his/her account. But it seems like the folks blocked by Trump want guaranteed access to Trump. Why were they blocked in the first place? Did they commit a violation of the Twitter TOS that are reportedly not even applied to violators across the political spectrum? That’s not guaranteed by the First Amendment. You have a right to say whatever you like, so long as it doesn’t intrude on others’ constitutional rights. But the First Amendment doesn’t compel anyone to listen to you. You’re not guaranteed a platform.
In all the comments I’ve made on SITD, I think that you will not find any evidence of “Obama derangement syndrome.” I have criticized the media’s fawning treatment of Obama. Obama was the lawfully elected president of the United States. For good or ill he was the choice of the people.
MP, Emery just writes shit, all sorts of shit. “Trump is clearly the worst negotiator in the world”, you “have a long demonstrated history of Obama Derangement Syndrone”. He’s just looking for attention.
Well, JDM, I think that there is more than one person commenting under Emery’s account. Or maybe he is schizo.
Well, JDM, I think that there is more than one person commenting under Emery’s account. Or maybe he is schizo.
It might be one person, but the multiple voices come from the constant plagiarizing. It’s like a bien pensant version of the MLB Whiparound.
jdm: If @realDonaldTrump is being defended by the Department of Justice, the DOJ is asserting that @realDonaldTrump is an official Federal government channel.
Where I agree with you is if the president’s Twitter feed is a public forum, isn’t everyone’s? So why didn’t the Judge ban anyone from blocking their account?
So, nothing at all to back up your claims Emery? What a fool. I guess negative attention is good enough.
jdm: If @realDonaldTrump is being defended by the Department of Justice, the DOJ is asserting that @realDonaldTrump is an official Federal government channel.
Why? If the JD was defending the president’s first amendment rights, it wouldn’t imply that his every spoken word was an official pronouncement of the federal government. The president ain’t the pope.
This must be what is referred to as: “being nibbled to death by ducks” .😏
You know how every website is supposed to have a disclaimer that they use cookies? The government officials pages should say you are free to comment and we will not block you, we will take down your name and ISP and make a list of people we don’t like. Now, what was your comment?
JD: I wish you had explained a little more about the applicable law. My guess is that the judge ruled that Trump’s twitter account created a public forum of 5.2 million people. Furthermore, Trump and his White House have stated that his tweets are official government communications, therefore this pubic forum is a government public forum. By excluding (blocking) speakers from this public government forum, Trump violated the First Amendment rights of those he blocks. Because they are blocked due to the content of their speech, Trumps actions do not meet the criteria of what the case law calls “time, place and manner” restrictions. Therefore the blocking constitutes a violation of the First Amendment.
thanks for commenting Emery. Your name and ISP up and take it down. They will forward it to the IRS for investigation and