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posted by martyb on Friday May 25 2018, @03:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the rejection-rejected dept.

President Trump's practice of blocking Twitter users who are critical of him from seeing his posts on the social media platform violates the First Amendment, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday.

The ruling came in a case brought by seven Twitter users who had been blocked by the @realDonaldTrump account after they criticized the president.

The plaintiffs, who were joined in the suit by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, claimed that Mr. Trump's Twitter feed is an official government account and that blocking users from following it was a violation of their First Amendment rights.

In her ruling, Federal District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote of the plaintiffs that "the speech in which they seek to engage is protected by the First Amendment" and that Mr. Trump and Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, "exert governmental control over certain aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/business/media/trump-twitter-block.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

See also: http://time.com/4808270/sean-spicer-donald-trump-twitter-statements/:

When asked at a press briefing whether Trump's tweets qualify as official statements on behalf of the White House, Spicer said that he "is the President of the United States, so they're considered official statements by the President of the United States."


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday May 26 2018, @02:34AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday May 26 2018, @02:34AM (#684321)

    So apparently if you're president now you legally have no private life. I mean, pragmatically maybe you didn't already because paparazzi, but yeah.

    You pretty much don't: Not just because of the paparazzi, but because you are required to report a great deal of your activities to the public. Plus you are at beck and call of the job at all hours of the day, because, for instance, you might get the proverbial 3 AM phone call, and not answering it now means you have a nuclear war on your hands.

    the reason you're required to report so much to the public is that the public is your boss. Think of it this way: If you did allow presidents to have a private life, they could and will be bribed and blackmailed even more than they already are, and hide that from the public by saying "that's private".

    More to the point, you certainly can't describe statements made to the public via the Internet as part of your private life. A pre-Internet version of what Trump's position is: He wants to be able to hold a press conference and say that only Breitbart can report on what is said about it.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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