A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump can’t block Twitter users from following him.
Here’s a key excerpt from the ruling, by Judge Naomi Buchwald of New York’s Southern District:
We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the “interactive space’ where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s tweets — are properly
analyzed under the “public forum’ doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.
People on the right are making hay with this online today, saying that the ruling having declared Twitter a “public forum” protected by the First Amendment means that the company will no longer be able to suppress political speech they don’t approve of (as has been rampant on Twitter). I thought so myself at first, and you will probably hear someone make this claim yourself over the next couple of days.
But a closer reading of the ruling shows that the judge only considered Mr. Trump’s “government-controlled” account to be such a forum, and so the decision is actually quite narrow in scope.
Eugene Volokh explains, here.
3 Comments
Very narrow indeed: Under one of the minor semi-entanglements of the ninth penumbra of the third emanation of the Commerce Clause, there’s a little known nuance that… tl;dr the Framers clearly intended for this to apply only to certain officials. If that set of officials it applies to happens to be exactly coextensive with one particular party, well, that just goes to show how un-American that party is. They have like a creepy vibe. That’s the bright line: The Creepy Vibe Test.
Well. Okay. How, exactly, does the court intend to enforce this? What happens if Trump just says “f*ck the court” and keeps blocking people?
Isn’t impeachment the only real recourse against a sitting President? And do you really think the Congress is going to impeach Trump for blocking someone on Twitter? Actually, that would probably be the funniest thing I would ever see in my lifetime.
Art’s mother?