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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 looorg on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:33PM (1 child)
Does everyone get to attend a town hall meeting and come up to the president and ask a question? You don't think those people that are in attendance are vetted? That is just a technical aspect related to speed. If the US post office could deliver mail instantaneously they probably would. The Presidents mail and other correspondence gets archived and is publicly available eventually. I assume bullshit mail, spam and death treats etc gets sorted out and handled by the Secret Service. Perhaps they should hire a buffer person that delays and handles his tweeting to, I assume if someone tweets the president that they are going to rip his head off and shit down his neck is going to get to a visit from the Secret Service to. Just ask Kathy Griffin. So mail, tweet or medium of communication doesn't matter in that regard. That he now uses an, near, instant form of communication shouldn't really change anything. It's just an aspect of technology - perhaps in a decade or two you'll have whomever is the president use whatever is the technology communication device de jour -- it might beam his or her thoughts into the brains of people for all we know. It's not that many presidents ago that they didn't even send or have email, I don't recall but wasn't Clinton on of the first? Didn't Obama also tweet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:10PM
Vetted for what? If the aim is to exclude people who are likely to say something unflattering, that invites the sort of lawsuit this story is about. TFA:
Would you put up with that at a physical meeting in your town? Suppose the vetting revealed that you disagreed with the mayor, would you be OK with being excluded? I think that if there's a warrant for someone's arrest, or if the person is obviously committing a crime, those are valid reasons to arrest them instead of letting them enter. I have trouble imagining what would be a valid reason, under American law, to turn a law-abiding person away from a public assembly.
There's a difference in kind between a communication that gets published on the Internet immediately, and one that becomes available (by, I assume, visiting the National Archives and/or making a written request) after a President leaves office. Imagine that my reply were coming years after your comment.
I don't know the details, but I assume the same thing. Those mails, like the others, probably get archived and after the President leaves office, the public has access to them, I would guess. This lawsuit isn't purely about the ability to send a message to the President. It's about the ability to hold a "conversation" in public. Must the President, by going on Twitter, allow his detractors to do that with him?