Twitter users blocked by president file lawsuit, argue Trump’s feed is public forum

WASHINGTON — A group of Twitter users blocked by President Donald Trump sued him and two top White House aides Tuesday, arguing that his account amounts to a public forum that he, as a government official, cannot bar people from.

The blocked Twitter users, represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, raised cutting-edge issues about how the Constitution applies to the social-media era. They say Trump cannot bar people from engaging with his account because they expressed opinions he did not like, such as mocking or criticizing him.

“The @realDonaldTrump account is a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public, and members of the public use the reply function to respond to the president and his aides and exchange views with one another,” the lawsuit said.

By blocking people from reading his tweets, or from viewing and replying to message chains based on them, Trump is violating their First Amendment rights because they expressed views he did not like, the lawsuit argued.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit also names Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, and Dan Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, as defendants. It seeks a declaration that Trump’s blocking of the plaintiffs was unconstitutional, an injunction requiring him to unblock them and prohibiting him from blocking others for the views they express, and legal fees.

The Knight First Amendment Institute, directed by Jameel Jaffer, also joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff although its Twitter account had not been blocked by Trump.

The lawsuit was foreshadowed last month by a letter the Knight First Amendment Institute sent to Trump on behalf of two of the now-plaintiffs asking him to unblock their accounts, but the White House did not do so.

News of the letter, and the novel legal arguments it advanced, touched off a debate among legal specialists, with some supporting the idea and others expressing skepticism. The skeptics argued, among other things, that Trump’s account was personal, not official; that he had the same right to block people he considered trolls as anyone else; and that the injury to blocked people was minor since they could still view his postings as long as they did not log in to Twitter under their own accounts.

Also since the early June letter, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a North Carolina law barring convicted sex offenders from using Twitter or Facebook violated the First Amendment.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-justice majority, said the law violated the First Amendment because social media had become “the modernday public square.” Justice Samuel Alito, joined by two other justices, concurred with the result but expressed reservations that Kennedy’s language was too sweeping and loose.

Since then, several other blocked users from around the country have joined the effort. They include Rebecca Buckwalter, a fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, whose account was blocked after she responded to a tweet by Trump on June 6 in which he disparaged the “fake news” media and said he would not have won the election if he relied on it.

She replied, “To be fair, you didn’t win the WH: Russia won it for you” — and she was blocked by Trump’s account.