Twitter account personal: mayor

Ottawa chief ‘has the right not to be harassed’

right to hear what public officials say in public and to talk about it yourself.

Trump doesn’t have to listen to people who get on his nerves, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote, but he’s not allowed to stop them from listening to him. He can mute them, in other words, but not block them. Also, various workarounds — if you log out of Twitter you can read public tweets you’d otherwise be blocked from seeing — aren’t adequate alternatives because they don’t let you respond publicly to Trump’s tweets as yourself, she ruled.

“While we must recognize, and are sensitive to, the president’s personal First Amendment rights, he cannot exercise those rights in a way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him,” Buchwald wrote.

Government lawyers, working on Trump’s behalf, have appealed the decision. This thing is probably headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, especially since there’s a contrary ruling on another similar case involving the governor of Kentucky. A different judge ruled there that even if the governor uses Twitter or Facebook accounts for public purposes they’re still his personal accounts on privately owned sites, so the First Amendment doesn’t apply.

The Kentucky ruling treated blocking as the only way to make people who bug you on Twitter go away. That judge

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLITICIANS ACROSS CANADA.

didn’t take up the distinction between blocking and muting, which is central to the argument.

Back here in Ottawa, Watson can be a different person on Twitter from the gladhander who can hit up seven pancake breakfasts in a day and still have time for three meetings, two fundraisers and a diplomatic reception. The Twitter Watson can be cranky and thin-skinned. He’s scorned Taman, on Twitter, for running unsuccessfully for multiple public offices — after he’d already blocked her, so it was behind her back. Something in her brings out the worst in the mayor.

Even someone who has a hair-trigger blocking reflex could switch all his blocks to mutes in minutes, which is the obvious way out of this for Watson. But the Tamanpenner-hutt case is not the kind of thing he backs down on easily. If he won’t, we’ll at least get a judge’s ruling in a case that has implications for politicians across Canada.