Judge says president can’t block Twitter feed

Apart from the man himself, perhaps nothing has defined President Donald Trump’s political persona more than Twitter.

It was through the @realDonaldTrump account on the social platform that Trump kick-started what once seemed like a long-shot presidential bid and mobilized his electoral base.

Now that he is in the White House, he uses Twitter to announce policies, conduct diplomacy and command his subordinates in front of an audience that has grown to 52 million followers.

Just as often, Trump wields Twitter as a weapon, lashing out at Democrats, the news media, the special counsel investigation that looms over his administration, and anything else that draws his ire, inside or outside of government. But Wednesday, one of Trump’s Twitter habits — his practice of blocking critics on the service, preventing them from engaging with his account — was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Manhattan.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote of seven plaintiffs who sued Trump and several aides after being blocked by Trump’s Twitter account that “the speech in which they seek to engage is protected by the First Amendment.” Buchwald added Trump and Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, “exert governmental control over certain aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account.”

The plaintiffs, who were joined in the suit by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, had argued Trump’s Twitter feed was an official government account and that blocking users from following it was a violation of their First Amendment rights.

In her ruling, Buchwald, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, agreed. “The viewpoint-based exclusion of the individual plaintiffs from that designated public forum is proscribed by the First Amendment and cannot be justified by the president’s personal First Amendment interests,” she wrote.

Jameel Jaffer, the Knight First Amendment Institute’s executive director and the counsel for the plaintiffs, said it was clear what Trump should do in light of the ruling. “The position the Trump administration is taking is that the president is entitled to block people, and that the court lacks the ability to order him to do otherwise,” Jaffer said. Although the judge had not ordered it, he said, “The right thing for the president and his social media director to do would be to log into the president’s account and unblock everyone who has been blocked on the basis of viewpoint.”

There was no immediate sign that would happen. “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision and are considering our next steps,” said a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, which is representing Trump in the case.