POLICY
POLICY
POLICY
Trump asks Supreme Court to allow him to block his critics on Twitter
The White House today called for the Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court ruling that said President Donald Trump wasn’t allowed to block his critics on his go-to social media platform, Twitter Inc.
Trump appealed that decision, but a court ruled that because the president does government business on Twitter, it is the right under the First Amendment that people should not be blocked just because he doesn’t like their opinion.
“In resolving this appeal, we remind the litigants and the public that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less,” a judge said back in July 2019.
In today’s petition, the Trump administration argued that the account is a personal account and not the official account of the president. He does use the @POTUS account and can address the 31.1 million followers there, but the president often chooses to use his personal account, which has 85.4 million followers.
“President Trump’s ability to use the features of his personal Twitter account, including the blocking function, are independent of his presidential office,” Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall wrote in the petition. “Blocking third-party accounts from interacting with the @realDonaldTrump account is a purely personal action that does not involve any ‘right or privilege created by the State.’”
The original case in 2017 was brought by the the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. It filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven Twitter users who had complained that they had been blocked from Trump’s personal account after issuing counter-opinions. The same institute last month filed a new lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on behalf of another five people who had been purged from Trump’s account.
Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, said in a statement today that he hopes the Supreme Court will reject the White House’s petition. “Government officials can’t exclude people from public forums simply because they disagree with their political views,” he said.
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
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