Twitter foes of Trump triumph
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has been violating the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account because they criticized or mocked him, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The ruling could have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to the social media era.
Because Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously.
Writing for the panel, Judge Barrington D. Parker noted that the conduct of the government and its officials are subject today to a “wide-open, robust debate” that “generates a level of passion and intensity the likes of which have rarely been seen.” The First Amendment prohibits an official who uses a social media account for government purposes from excluding people from an “otherwise open online dialogue” because they say things the official disagrees with, he wrote.
“This debate, as uncomfortable and as unpleasant as it frequently may be, is nonetheless a good thing,” Parker wrote. “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.”
The Justice Department had no immediate response to the ruling. But Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which represented a group of Twitter users who were blocked by Trump and filed the lawsuit, praised it. He said that public officials’ social media accounts are among the most significant forums for the public to discuss government policy.
“The ruling will ensure that people aren’t excluded from these forums simply because of their viewpoints and that public officials don’t transform these digital spaces into echo chambers,” Jaffer said. “It will help ensure the integrity and vitality of digital spaces that are increasingly important to our democracy.”
Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, has nearly 62 million followers, and he often uses it to make policy pronouncements and communicate with the public, driving the news of the day. Last week, for example, Trump used Twitter to abruptly announce that the government would still seek to add a question to the 2020 census about people’s citizenship, reversing what administration officials had previously told a court.
His posts routinely generate tens of thousands of replies, as people respond to what he has said and engage in debates with each other.
Against that backdrop, a group of Twitter users whom Trump had blocked from accessing his postings asked the White House to be unblocked and then, when their request went unheeded, sued him.
The lawsuit argued that Trump’s account amounted to a public forum — a “digital town hall” — so his decision to selectively block people from participating in that forum because he did not like what they said amounted to unconstitutional discrimination based on their viewpoints.
Trump’s legal team argued, among other things, that he operated the account merely in a personal capacity and so had the right to block whomever he wanted for any reason — including because users annoyed him by criticizing or mocking him.
But the appeals court disagreed, saying he was clearly acting in a government capacity in his use of Twitter.
The ruling upheld a May 2018 decision by a U.S. District Court judge that also found Trump’s practice of blocking his critics from his Twitter account to be unconstitutional. After that ruling, the White House unblocked the specific plaintiffs’ accounts — but not other users who were not involved in the case — while filing an appeal.