SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Wednesday July 12 2017, @05:11PM
The second problem is that @potus is supposed to be the official channel, but @realDonaldTrump is where all the insanity gets posted.
Legally, one could define the first as public space nobody should get blocked from, while the other would be a "private citizen"'s blabberspace with blocking rights.
But this particular politician is not about to separate his private and public megaphones.