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from the silence-all-disagreement-and-only-agreement-will-be-seen dept.
Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute has filed a lawsuit against President Trump for blocking seven users on Twitter, claiming that the action violates the users' First Amendment right to participate in a public political forum:
The institute filed suit today on behalf of seven Twitter users who were blocked by the president, which prevents them from seeing or replying to his tweets. It threatened legal action in a letter to Trump in June, and now "asks the court to declare that the viewpoint-based blocking of people from the @realDonaldTrump account is unconstitutional."
The lawsuit, which was filed in the Southern District of New York, elaborates on the Knight Institute's earlier letter. It contends that Trump's Twitter account is a public political forum where citizens have a First Amendment right to speak. Under this theory, blocking users impedes their right to participate in a political conversation and stops them from viewing official government communication. Therefore, if Trump blocks people for criticizing his political viewpoints, he'd be doing the equivalent of kicking them out of a digital town hall.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:03PM
It's not unconstitutional that they put up a fence around the white house so you can't go petition for redress of grievances directly whenever you want. Appropriate boundaries that still allow for some method of trying to communicate with the government is fucking fine. Wethepeople.gov is a perfectly reasonable digital means to petition the whitehouse.
On the other hand, this administration has already made insinuations of legal manipulaiton of free press that probably are a violation.
*Restricting recording of press briefings without justifiable cause(precedented, but probably also unconstitutional when previous presidents did it once or twice, not a half dozen times already)
*Insinuating that negative coverage of the president would interfere with merger rulings for turner/time warner. Seriously, no patriotic American could ever support an administration that.
*Suggestions of press corps access being denied for negative coverage by the Washington Post(don't know if they followed through)
There's plenty of real goddamn suppression of free speech that stupid minor twitter shit related to president's "personal" account aren't important.
(By the way republican voters are traitors to the US, and if you mod me down, you're obviously violating the first amendment)