Justices dismiss Trump Twitter case
High court declines to rule, as matter is moot
WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump had about 89 million followers on Twitter before the platform suspended his account earlier this year, but the Supreme Court signaled Monday that it wasn’t interested in how he got along – or didn’t – with some of them.
The justices dismissed as moot a high-profile case about whether Trump was on solid legal ground when he blocked several of his critics on his once-favorite social media website, wiping away a federal appeals court ruling that found Trump’s actions violated the First Amendment.
Both sides in the suit had agreed the case is moot because Trump is no longer president and no longer has access to Twitter. The company permanently suspended his account in January after a rally the then-president held near the White House and the riot at the U.S. Capitol afterward.
But the blocked Twitter users nevertheless asked the justices to leave the ruling in place from the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit as a guidepost for future government officials. Without offering a detailed explanation, the court declined to do so.
“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, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented the blocked users.
“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,” Jaffer said.
A Trump aide did not respond to a request for comment.
Though the court did not issue an opinion, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion raising broader questions about the power of social media companies that at times echoed Trump’s own assertions.
“The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least,” Thomas wrote. “Mr. Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages. Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages.”
Thomas compared Twitter and other large social media companies to communication utilities, asserting that the concentration in the industry gives some digital platforms “enormous control over speech.” Before the riot at the Capitol, Trump and other conservatives accused Google, Twitter and other social media companies of limiting their speech, though they have not provided direct evidence to back up that claim.
A New York University study earlier this year found that rather than censoring conservatives, social media platforms amplify their voices.
But Thomas asserted that the companies could do so and that their power raises questions about applying “old” First Amendment doctrine to social media.
“When a user does not already know exactly where to find something on the Internet – and users rarely do – Google is the gatekeeper between that user and the speech of others 90% of the time,” he wrote. “It can suppress content by deindexing or downlisting a search result or by steering users away from certain content by manually altering autocomplete results.”
Trump invited the court battle in 2017 by blocking some Twitter users from following his popular account, @realDonaldTrump. Blocked users can’t read tweets, respond to them directly or contribute to comment threads. Seven users went to court, charging that Trump was seeking to “suppress dissent.”