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Twitter Users Blocked By Trump Sue, Claim @realDonaldTrump Is Public Forum (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A handful of Twitter users, backed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, sued President Donald Trump on Tuesday, claiming their constitutional rights are being violated because the president has blocked them from his @realDonaldTrump handle. The suit claims that Trump's Twitter feed is a public forum and an official voice of the president. Excluding people from reading or replying to his tweets -- especially because they tweeted critical comments -- amounts to a First Amendment breach, according to the lawsuit.
"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," according to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in New York federal court. "Defendants' viewpoint-based blocking of the Individual Plaintiffs from the @realDonaldTrump account infringes the Individual Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights. It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their participation in a designated public forum," the suit says. "It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to access statements that Defendants are otherwise making available to the public at large. It also imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to petition the government for redress of grievances."
"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," according to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in New York federal court. "Defendants' viewpoint-based blocking of the Individual Plaintiffs from the @realDonaldTrump account infringes the Individual Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights. It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their participation in a designated public forum," the suit says. "It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to access statements that Defendants are otherwise making available to the public at large. It also imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to petition the government for redress of grievances."
@realDonaldTrump IS NOT a public forum. Is the personal Twitter account of Mr. Donald J. Trump.
@POTUS is a public forum, as is the account of the President Of The United States.
The lawsuit soud be about Mr. Donald J. Trump using his PERSONAL twitter Account to conduct matters of state and public interest...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
This is the kind of utter nonsense that's likely to get us a second Trump term, making everybody on the ant-Trump side look like complete morons.
(And no, I didn't vote for the SOB.)
I don't think that's going to work. The White House and most if not all Senators and Congressmen have web pages for many years and have never given up the right to control what goes on them.
Free speech does not mean that the government has to publish whatever you want to say. When the president gives a speech he does not have to give up the microphone to you.
Further, if this actually got to court they could point out that the plaintiffs have multiple other avenues to having their voiced heard. There is no constitutional reason it has to be on the president's twitter feed.
Big Meh
It's a private forum when the left uses to censor people. But it's suddenly a public forum when they are the ones being censored.
how can we disenfranchise 63 million heavily-armed idiots? Bible-thumping assmonkeys
And this is why this country is the state it's in. Have some respect for your fellow Americans, even if you don't agree with them. You keep calling them militant rednecks, they keep calling you communist tree huggers, and nothing changes for the better. Try understanding and compromising, instead of demonizing and neutralizing.
I'm not an American but having followed and participated in quite a few discussions about Trump and Trump supporters, here's the challenge with this: generally speaking anyone with enough intelligence can understand your point is correct, and that simply launching insults at people is not going to change anyone's mind.
But that's just it; to understand the value of civility and focusing on factual discussion instead of personal traits requires some education. The trump-base at this point consist of mostly uneducated people many of whom think for example that repealing Obamacare is a good thing when they're relying on it themselves but simply do not realize that the affordable care act and 'Obamacare' are one and the same thing. These are often extremely mis and disinformed people who are very easily manipulated with outright lies as their capability and willingness to do fact-checking is highly limited, which is why they're easy prey for all sorts of conspiracy theorists á la Alex turning the freaking frogs gay' Jones.
Now then, obviously mocking these people won't make them any smarter or get them to realize their errors, so doing that is a waste of time and resources. However at the same time 'understanding and compromising' is not something they're really all that capable of at this point because trump has effectively put them in this mindset of 'winning' vs 'losing'. In their minds, the 'losers' from the 'fake news' outlets are outraged that Trump won and are trying to sabotage him from every angle, so obviously the news are going to report negative things about him but that's just because they don't want him to "win." Like the conspiracy theorists, it doesn't really mater how much data you present to them to try and show them they're wrong because they' quite naturally ignore evidence that runs contrary to their understanding. Confirmation bias combined with Dunning-Kruger effect (Trump supporters largely overestimating their own knowledge and abilities) and curse of knowledge where the non-Trump side assumes that the Trump supporters have all the skills available to be able to understand why the concept of say climate change is not 'a Chinese conspiracy to make American corporations less competitive' as Trump claimed if someone just hands them the facts. But that's not how it goes, and anyone who's ever debated a conspiracy theorist or been one himself will know this.
In short: as long as you have a president in charge of the country whose main rhetorical devices are lying, insults and obfuscation, I'm afraid expecting the general level of political discussion to elevate itself to a higher level is probably futile. The only long lasting answer is to educate the poor people more, which the Trump administration certainly is not going to do because it thrives on ignorance.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead