Mayor defends blocking some from Twitter account
Mayor Jim Watson will stick up for his right to block people from following him on Twitter if they pester him, he said Wednesday, a day after three people asked a court to rule that doing so is unconstitutional.
“This is my personal Twitter account,” he said in a statement relayed by spokesman Mathieu Gravel. “I have the right not to be attacked and harassed by the same individuals on a regular basis. I believe in civility in public discourse, and this type of behaviour would not be tolerated in a face-to-face debate. I look forward to dealing with this matter in due course.”
The three litigants he faces — law professor and NDP candidate Emilie Taman, Dylan Penner of the Council of Canadians, and James Hutt of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, among other groups — say that when Watson blocked them from reading his tweets, each at a different point in the last few weeks, he violated their right to free expression.
If he had just used Twitter’s “mute” function on them, their lawyer Paul Champ says, that would be OK. That would prevent Watson from seeing what they write on Twitter, but not vice-versa. They’re not arguing that they have a right to force him to listen to them, just that they have a right to see what Watson, their mayor, is saying in a public forum like Twitter.
Watson tweets almost constantly about public affairs, about things he’s doing as mayor, about city initiatives. Wednesday, for instance, he tweeted pictures of himself — taken by somebody else — delivering a framed mayoral letter of congratulations to a new pet store. This wasn’t something he was doing in his private time.
The day before, he tweeted about visits to two schools, a daycare (for another mayoral proclamation, this one of a civic day in honour of childcare workers and early childhood educators), and a city hall fundraiser for victims of natural disasters in Indonesia. He’s not invited to these places for his swell company.
The way a politician uses a purportedly personal social media account has been important in similar cases in the United States, including one President Donald Trump lost last summer.
The Trump case involves American law and not Canadian, obviously, but both traditions draw on similar liberal democratic ideas and the cases involve practically identical facts: some lefties bugged the president on Twitter so he, or someone commanding his account, blocked them.
The judge who ruled against Trump delivered a 75-page decision explaining that Twitter is a public forum, that the origin of Trump’s Twitter account (which he had long before entering politics) is neither here nor there if he’s now using it for presidential purposes, and how the First Amendment that guarantees free speech in the United States includes the 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 would 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 privatelyowned 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 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 glad-hander 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 had already blocked her, so it was behind her back. Something in her brings out the worst in the mayor.
Even someone who has a hairtrigger blocking reflex could switch all his blocks to mutes in minutes, which is the obvious way out of this for Watson. But the Taman-Penner-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.