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Blocked by @realDonaldTrump: Unconstitutional?

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:08PM   
from the silence-all-disagreement-and-only-agreement-will-be-seen dept.

takyon writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Blocked by POTUS (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:10PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:10PM (#538243)

  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?

  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:

  if Trump blocks people for criticizing his political viewpoints, he’d be doing the equivalent of kicking them out of a digital town hall.

  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.

  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.

  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 assume bullshit mail, spam and death treats etc gets sorted out and handled by the Secret Service.

  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?

  Parent