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News > World

US Judge to Donald Trump: 'You Can't Block Twitter Critics'

  • The judge concluded that U.S. President Donald Trump's Twitter account is a public space to which everyone has access. 

    The judge concluded that U.S. President Donald Trump's Twitter account is a public space to which everyone has access.  | Photo: Reuters

Published 23 May 2018
Opinion

The judge concluded that U.S. President Donald Trump's Twitter account is a public space to which everyone has access.

In rather more than 280 characters, a U.S. federal court judge has ruled that President Donald Trump can't block critics from his personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump.

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New York Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that it's unconstitutional for the head of state to block Twitter users from his account simply because he doesn't agree with them, especially because Trump is a public figure who uses his personal account for political purposes.

The case – Knight Institute v. Trump – was brought to Buchwald's bench by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University last July.

The claimants say the president violated freedom of speech by blocking them followers from his account for posting messages he disliked.

University of Maryland Professor Philip Cohen was blocked by Trump in June 2017 after he answered a text from the president with the words: "Corrupt, incompetent, authoritarian."

Trump's lawyers and the White House director of social networks, Daniel Scavino, said the president had a right to decide who had access to his private twitter account.

However, the court ruled that the president is a public figure who has used his personal twitter account to make political announcements and that his feed is, indeed, a "public forum" and thus protected by the first amendment.

"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," Buchwald ruled.
 
Blocking the complainants from this public space "based on their political speech constitutes discrimination that violates the First Amendment," wrote the judge.
 
The president uses his account, which has 37,600 tweets and 52.2 million followers, to "take measures that can only be taken by the president as president," the ruling reads. The New York judge, appointed in 1999, offered a solution that Trump simply 'mute' certain accounts.
 
"Critically... the muted account may still reply directly to the muting account, even if that reply is ultimately ignored," the judge said. 
 
"The right of a person to speak is not violated when the government simply ignores that person while listening to others or amplifying one voice over others."
 
"Given that no government office is above the law, we assume that the president and [Daniel] Scavino will remedy the blockade that we have considered unconstitutional," which the plaintiffs have to request to Trump, says Buchwald.

Tags

U.S. Trump First Amendment Freedom of Speech Social media Twitter Naomi Reice Buchwald

Vox-Slate-El Pais
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