Federal judge rules Trump cannot block people on Twitter
A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Wednesday it is a violation of the First Amendment for President Trump to block a user from viewing his Twitter account.
“This case requires us to consider whether a public official may, consistent with the First Amendment, ‘block’ a person from his Twitter account in response to the political views that person has expressed, and whether the analysis differs because that public official is the President of the United States," U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said in her ruling. "The answer to both questions is no."
The lawsuit was filed in July by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of seven people who were blocked by @realDonaldTrump on Twitter after criticizing the president.
The plaintiffs argued that in blocking them from the president’s Twitter account, their First Amendment rights had been violated because his account is a public forum.
In her ruling, Buchwald agreed.
“We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account—the ‘interactive space’ where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s tweets —are properly analyzed under the ‘public forum’ doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment,” she wrote.
The Justice Department had pushed for the lawsuit to be dismissed and argued the president uses his Twitter account, started years before he ran for political office, on his own accord.
The decision to block his fellow Twitter users, the government argued, “is not properly considered state action.”
https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/federal-judge-rules-trump-cannot-block-people-on-twitter