TRUMP TWITTER JUDGMENT VACATED
Lower court ruled he violated Constitution by blocking critics
The Supreme Court on Monday vacated a lower court opinion that said President Donald Trump could not block critics from his Twitter feed, which since has been suspended by the company.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that because the president had used the forum to regularly communicate with the public, he could not block critical individual users. The case held implications for how elected officials nationwide interact with constituents on social media.
But Trump lost re-election, and Twitter canceled his account, leading the Supreme Court to tell the lower court to vacate the judgment and dismiss the case as moot.
There were no noted dissents from the order, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say the court at some point will need to examine the power of tech media companies.
It is “unprecedented,” Thomas wrote, to have “control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”
Thomas said it was true that some aspects of Trump’s account “resemble a constitutionally protected public forum.” But he said
the real work for government might be to limit the ability of social media companies to remove users.
“If the aim is to ensure that speech is not smothered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves,” Thomas wrote. “As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms.”
The Justice Department had asked the Supreme
Court to declare the case moot.
Because “the @realDonaldTrump account belongs to Mr. Trump personally, he will continue to have control over that account after his term of office has ended, subject to Twitter’s terms of service,” the department said in a brief. “After the inauguration, though, Mr. Trump will no longer be a party to this case, because respondents sued him only in his official capacity.”
Twitter suspended the
account on Jan. 8, two days after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to reverse his election defeat by stopping lawmakers from tallying electoral votes.
The organization that brought the lawsuit, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, requested that the Supreme Court not disturb the lower court ruling, but it said the point has been made.
“This case was about a very simple principle that is
foundational to our democracy: Public officials can’t bar people from public forums simply because they disagree with them,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, who argued the case before the Second Circuit.
“While we would have liked the Supreme Court to leave the Second Circuit’s ruling on the books, we’re gratified that the appeals court’s reasoning has already been adopted by other courts, and we’re confident it will continue to shape the way that public officials use social media.”
The case had been renamed Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute.
The Supreme Court also declined to hear an appeal by Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was fighting a Connecticut court sanction in a defamation lawsuit brought by relatives of some of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Jones was penalized in 2019 by a trial court judge for an angry outburst on his web show against an attorney for the relatives and for violating orders to turn over documents to the families’ lawyers. Judge Barbara Bellis barred Jones from filing a motion to dismiss the case, which remains pending, and said she would order Jones to pay some of the families’ legal fees.
Jones argued he should not have been sanctioned for exercising his free speech rights. The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld Bellis’ ruling last year.
The families and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting, which left 20 firstgraders and six educators dead, are suing Jones and his show over claims that the massacre was a hoax. The families said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy.
Jones has since said he believes the shooting occurred.
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