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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!
I've heard this multiple times, and I don't get it.
I hate Trump, but this is ridiculous.
If Trump chooses to ignore them... that's fine. They don't have a right to be heard by Trump.
They're still free to use Twitter.
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.
maybe the WH should turn the video back on.
we need snaps for the #WinterIsHere snap filter
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Trump is the symptom, not the disease. If we succeed in getting rid of Cheeto Benito, the 63 million voters who elected him will just elect somebody even less ethical, less intelligent, and less qualified.
The real question is, how can we disenfranchise 63 million heavily-armed idiots without starting a civil war? If we do nothing, these Bible-thumping assmonkeys will destroy our country as certainly as any civil war would.
This lawsuit will legitimize the idea that American citizens can criticize the President without consequences. The reason they were blocked on Twitter was because they said unkind or unfavorable things about our Dear Leader. The Great Orange Clown simply cannot have that.
/s tag?)
The media is so unkind. And so unfair! And people say bad things about the president. And life is unfair!
All past presidents have had bad things said about them. Look back at the things said of Obama. Or Bill Clinton. Or Republican presidents like George W Bush, or H W Bush, or Regan. That was then. Today the Great Orange Clown should not have to abide any negative remarks, thoughts, or political cartoons. This criticism must be stopped! Waaaaah! I need to have a nap before my Twitter meltdown! Waaaaah!
(do I need to put an
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Donald Trump is no different than anyone else to the extent that he has every right to have a personal social media account and some measure of privacy for that. But the problem is when he mixes his personal platform to talk with the bully pulpit of a public office (remember Hillary Clinton's private email server?) If you want to have a Twitter account, make it @DJtheprez and then get into petty public feuds with *that* and make your other account private.
If you want to talk about a love/hate relationship, don't look at the media, look at them and Trump :P
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
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
Shouldn't they be arguing that Twitter is the "digital town hall" and @realDonaldTrump is a corner where Trump stands on his soap box to make their analogy more fitting? Just because I am on Twitter (I'm not) doesn't mean I am listening to Trump.
"Twitter is a kind of digital town hall in which people use the tweet function to communicate news and information to each other and use the reply function to respond to each other and exchange views with one another"
If that is the case they are more arguing that Twitter should be impartial like other public accommodations. It isn't hard to translate the above to use the same justification for the impartiality of phone lines/companies.
"AT&T is a kind of digital town hall in which people use the phone to communicate news and information to each other and use the phone to respond to each other and exchange views with one another"
AT&T can't ban you for *wrong thing* but Twitter can. If your first reaction is "use a different Twitter". How many other Twitters host nearly every elected official of government?
The fundamental problem here is that the first amendment let's you say what want without being jailed. What it doesn't do is ensure that anyone has to listen to you. Secondly, you are talking about twitter, a private forum that can make up any rules that it wants or even violate it own rules without cause.
Like it or not, that's the reality.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The interesting part of this case is that it most likely will be decided upon whether or not the court system considers Trump's Twitter account to be the official word of the POTUS, or if it's considered a private account. His own staff has already muddied the water by stating that his tweets are official words of the administration. And his POTUS account is practically silent in comparison to his own personal account. I don't personally have a horse in this race, but I am quite interested in the outcome because either way the decision goes, it's going to be a significant decision.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
They don't let the public into press briefings (I'm not sure if they let the press in these days), and they wouldn't put up with them heckling if they did, and when POTUS makes a televised address he isn't forced to take phone calls from viewers afterwards.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
How many times has Trump and crew denied meetings with the Russians?
Those statements were all bad, false and dangerous that could get a lot of people killed. Probably have already gotten people killed.
Play Command HQ online
Not funny, but I never get any mod points so I can't give you the "insight" mod you earned. Actually, I was confused by your subject, but now I have probed and see that the Subject: was inherited from one of Putin's paid trolls. (Why are you feeding the troll?) This is a topic with LOTS of room for humor and insight, but I couldn't find any of the first and little of the second, especially in the comments so modded.
Actually I'm interested in "saving" Twitter. Probably impossible, but can you imagine the use of a dual icon system on Twitter? In some ways, the structured data of the Twitter might make it especially convenient to do the analysis. It's the same basic idea, with the left icon being your avatar and linked to your profile and whatever private information you want to share, and the right icon being a graphic summary of your public reputation and linked to an analysis of how people see you and the data (in the form of tweets, liked tweets, and RTs) that explains that public reputation. Might not even the multiple dimensions, but just a simple color code. Green for a reputable person, perhaps a verified authority or celebrity or someone who gets favorable reactions from such, yellow for a small amount of bad comments mixed in, orange for mostly negative reactions, and red for probably trolls, both the amateurs and Putin's professionals.
(On a "recovered" or page-one-rewritten Slashdot, I think multiple dimensions would be needed, but the basic color coding could still be used. As the joke goes, DAUPR. (Also, I like sincerity and I hate liars.))
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Hillary also met with the Russians. Her Foundation even got lots of money from them, and they paid her husband handsomely for speeches.
...and we went after Syria right afterwards.
Then there was the time Hillary met with the Saudi's....
"His name was James Damore."
It's one thing for a public figure to block comments on his personal account. But it's another entirely to block people from viewing otherwise public posts from account when he is also making policy statements.
The whole block posting & viewing thing on Twitter is a technical design flaw and I bet if he only blocked them from posting but allowed them to keep viewing that there wouldn't be anywhere near the controversy.
The consequence is we could potentially have the President of the United States barred from posting on Twitter until his term is up. The President doesn't necessarily have the same rights to free speech with his personal account that a regular schmoe has.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Haven't you heard? The Republicans are throwing slurs at Trump now too.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
and at most take comments. The president's twitter feed does not belong to the Republican party. If it did you might have a point. He's been using it more or less to conduct official business. He's made it public with his own actions. It's a little late to back out now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The lawsuit is frivolous and makes absolutely no sense, but it calls attention to something way more serious.
Twitter, or a Twitter account is NOT public forum, it should never be consider public forum, and people advocating for something like this are crazy for doing so.
The very basis for something to be considered public forum is that it has to be government owned.
@realDonaldTrump not only is a personal account, it also belongs to a private service. It can't and won't be considered public forum because if that happens, the consequences of that would be far reaching and a plain nightmare.
It would automatically call for regulation and monitoring of private channels.
But it indeed calls attention on how mismanaged the current administration is. A personal account on a private service should not and cannot be used to make official governmental statements. This is not only unprofessional, it's downright irresponsible.
I know lots of people nowadays scoff at the notion of proper procedures, but there's a reason why they are in place, and it has to do not only with the proper distance that has to be kept between government and private businesses, but also with security and management.
That is to say, of course governmental branches and individuals can and should keep open line of communications in all relevant platforms, but not conduct business and use them as official channels. It's an entirely other discussion, but there you are.
Being blocked from Trump's Twitter feed, they said, was illegal and akin to a mayor ejecting critics from city hall meetings.
There's critics and there's critics. Being kicked out from a town hall meeting for merely disagreeing with the mayor would be an outrage. Being kicked out for calling the mayor an orange haired, small handed (and we all know what that means), brainless, right wing nut job that wouldn't know how to dump piss from a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, and then proceeded to list all their "grievances" from the lack of government funded healthcare to the lack of paper towels in the ladies room, would not be an outrage.
I don't know what lead POTUS to ban these people from Twitter but I can imagine that there are some that were more than just "being critical" of POTUS.
President Trump needs to learn some care in what he sends on Twitter. He may learn in time but he's spent much of his life being free to do pretty much as he pleases. I fear this is an old habit that will be hard to break.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I think there's a difference between saying bad things, and saying false things.
Trump is saying things which are both bad and false.
Do you think there's a difference? Should the MSM be allowed to print just any old thing they make up?
No, and they aren't. But they are allowed to call opinion news, thanks to Faux News.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did she lie about it? Did they assist her in the election? U.S. has had it in for Assad for decades.
Play Command HQ online
If you're @xyz and you block someone they won't show up in other people's feeds that are subscribed to @xyz. If they managed to do #maga or whatever then they will still show up in those feeds if people have also subscribed to those keywords.
If you can read without logging in, then great. I see an overlay asking me to log in that I don't know how to remove. Maybe the technical problems are solved, if so, then nevermind.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oh come now. There has never been a more obvious and extreme RINO than Donald J. Trump.
The man ran on an economic platform that was to the LEFT of Hillary (almost, but not quite, as far to the left as Sanders' platform).
Of course, he hasn't actually lived up to that platform as POTUS ("no cuts to medicaid" and "coverage for everybody" remember) - but that's what he ran on. He RAN as a straight up RINO ! He won over the rest of the republican clown car BECAUSE he was a RINO - it turns out, the public WANTED a RINO - the one thing NOBODY wanted was more tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everybody else. And since that is what "republican" has mean ever since Reagan anybody who doesn't run on that is the very definition of a RINO.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Once again you're here "well they do it so we can do it too!" that is NOT how being an adult works. And if you cant be an adult you have no room in this conversation.
No. There is clear order of succession that is followed for presidency between elections when the president is unable to perform his or her duties for any reason, and that is what would be followed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
YUGE WOOOOOSH :^)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Okay then not the RINO's but rather the Washington GOP Establishment which hated him from the beginning, except for in comparison to Ted Cruz who they hated even more because he wouldn't lie to his constituents by voting for a Senate rule change that would have let the then Dominant Dems force through a bill the right was opposed to. The R's couldn't vote for it as it would outrage their constituencies, so instead they wanted to vote for a rule change (which required a unanimous vote to pass) that would let the Dems pass the bill with just a majority. Ted and one other refused to vote for the rule change, so the establishment hated him, so much they couldn't bring themselves to back him when they still had the opportunity to stop Trump.
So it is the wishy washy establishment that has caved repeatedly to the demands of the left that is insulting Trump. Not necessarily RINO's. But if they cave to the left at every turn are they not in fact RINO's?
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Okay... let me put this in terms you can understand.
There is NO SUCH THING as "caving to the left".
Government is DESIGNED to require compromises - NOBODY is supposed to get everything they want. You're supposed to negotiate with the opposition. "We'll give you this much of what you want, if you'll give us that much of what we want".
That's how it's SUPPOSED to be - it's how the founding fathers fucking designed it.
Politicians who refuse to make compromises, who refuse to negotiate, who pretend their constituents are the ONLY people in America - don't belong in government and are assholes who are betraying the entire country including their own constituents. Ted Cruz is a textbook example of how NOT to govern a country.
And frankly - if the right in America has a problem it's not "caving to the left" anyway, it's FAILING to compromise ENOUGH.
The spent 8 years on nothing but rampant obstruction - even of ideas they liked and thus produced a congress that achieved absolutely fucking nothing - and THAT is what pissed people off.
Again - Trump got elected for being economically LEFTWING. If ever there was a compromise candidate in the GOP it was Trump. Trump pushed every fucking policy the democrats have been afraid to push for being TOO leftwing for decades, and every policy the GOP has been falsely warning the democrats would push if you let them !
Trump was rightwing in may ways - he's a nativist, an ethno-nationalist (which makes being racist unavoidable), a sexist and much more - but on the economic stuff, he is the most leftwing candidate the US has elected since fucking FDR !
He's policies are to the LEFT of Kenedy.
He's policies are to the LEFT of LBJ.
The only current politicians further left economically than Trump are Sanders and Warren for fucks sake.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Will someone at twitter please put a random password on that account and conveniently loose it?
No. If a Sitting President is Impeached and convicted by the Senate with a 2/3rds majority vote (67 guilty votes). Then he is removed and his Vice President is elevated to the Office of the President. If the VP should somehow be removed in an unprecedented (and questionable) double impeachment then the seat goes to the Speaker of the House (Paul Ryan). He would be followed by the President Pro-tem of the Senate (Sen Orrin Hatch) and then down through the Cabinet.
In no parallel Universe operating under our Constitution does Hillary or any Democrat get the Presidency through anything but the next election in 2020.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Why would she need to lie about it when the witch hunt about 'ze russians haxx0rz' didn't start yet?
Caving: The so called government shutdown the left likes to try to pin on Junior Senators Cruz and Lee from the then minority party of the Senate.
The House put forward a budget bill that repealed the ACA, of course the left wasn't going to let it pass. Reid wouldn't even let it on the Senate floor. And the shut-down began. The House then passed multiple additional budget bills each time reducing the demands, but Reid refused to let the bills onto the Senate floor for debate let alone for a vote. They tried the negotiation path, but seeing that Reid was successfully blocking them they caved rather than stand firm and forcing a negotiation. They were more afraid of the media lies than pushing the truth and forcing negotiations and compromise. And they've kept on doing the same.
Yes they do CAVE, and have done so repeatedly. Yes Trump is very centrist, he's been a Democrat at times. It makes the objections of the left rather amusing because they really couldn't have asked for a more malleable Republican President out of the candidates. Gov Christie might have been about on par. But their non-stop outrage has pushed him quite a ways to the right on many issues.
If the GOP Establishment would use the majorities they have in both houses and actually push an agenda they could accomplish a lot, but they cave time and again, resulting in nothing happening. Repeal the ACA and then invite the left to negotiate a replacement with compromises. But no, they just Cave or worse, they try to do the same thing the Dems did when they passed the ACA in the first place, keep it hidden and then bring out a massive bill and not give sufficient time to digest and evaluate it before demanding a vote.
As to Trump's fiscal policies, I really don't care. The House sets the budget and fiscal policy, not the President.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Do facts ever enter your head ?
Lets just take your last sentence:
"hey try to do the same thing the Dems did when they passed the ACA in the first place, keep it hidden and then bring out a massive bill and not give sufficient time to digest and evaluate it before demanding a vote"
Yes, that's what the GOP is trying to do - and it's fucking evil, but that is not at all how the ACA was passed. The dems went bipartisan on that. They chose a healthcare proposal that originated with the republicans (Newt Gingrich practically wrote it in reality). They then spent over a year in negotiations, public hearings, townhalls. Republicans added more than one hundred amendments to the original draft bill. What was finally passed was, perhaps, the most bipartisan bill in US history - and one of the most consulted-on bills too.
Yet immediately after it passed the republicans started lying about it- claiming it was forced down their throaghts and rushed through. Bullshit. They had over a year to negotiate - and they USED that year, adding more than 100 amendments (including removing the public option - the worst mistake the democrats ever made was letting them do that).
Now compare that to Trumpcare- which fits your description perfectly.
And as for the shutdown - no that was entirely, exclusively, and utterly the fault of the obstructionist refusal to compromise by the republicans, especially Cruz and the 40-odd (then) members of the 'freedom caucus' (which is about as dumb a name as 'freedom fries' were). There was one demand that was never going to fly - to undo the healthcare bill, they had the option to pass a budget without that impossible demand - they chose to keep it in right to the end, and thus they chose to shut down the government. Ultimately they didn't 'cave' - they just plain fucking lost.
And as it stands now, just look at the present state of things. If liberals were like the republicans (all about power and winning) then they would be quietly letting Trumpcare pass. It's mere possibility has already raised support for single-payer to the highest levels in US history. A huge amount of that support comes from Trump voters ! Imagine what it would do if it passed. It would absolutely guarantee that the next time the dems are in power single payer WILL happen.
And yet liberals in the democrat party are fighting AGAINST Trumpcare, they aren't making the tactical decision to let it pass and use the disaster to get single payer. Even Bernie Sanders who has spent his entire career fighting for it, and Elizabeth Warren are fighting against Trumpcare. Because as much as they want single payer - they aren't prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to get it.
There isn't a republican on the hill who wouldn't gladly sacrifice millions to get his signature policy passed.
That's the difference. How anybody sane can support the republicans is beyond me. The party literally exists for the sole purpose of fucking you in the ass and making sure that if some rich asshole decides he can make money by killing you that the coming murder will be legal
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Did she lie about it?
Yes.
The trick to asking questions in a debate where you want to prove something... is to know what the answer is first.
Did they assist her in the election?
The Saudi's? Yes. Millions of dollars. Public record. Facts.
"His name was James Damore."
The complainants imagine high-level officials are busy reading everyone's replies to Trump's tweets...
Twitter isn't built for 'conversations', it's built for monologues.
Ken
Speaking hypothetically.... if something were to happen to every single one of the people that was in the line (I realize how grossly improbable this is... that's why I'm saying hypothetically)... what *would* happen? Would they also then have to hold a new federal election out of schedule?
Constitutionally speaking, is there any eventuality at all for something such as this?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If the Democrats take the House in 2018, the Speaker would be a Democrat, and if Trump and Pence left office somehow without enough intervening time to nominate a new VP and get that person approved by the Senate, the new President would be a Democrat. Impeachment and conviction aren't the most common ways Presidents and VPs leave office; I believe the leading cause is death, followed by resignation.
Another scenario would be a sufficiently big disaster to wipe out the Cabinet and everyone earlier in the succession chain. At that point, I believe the succession goes to some surviving Senator, I don't know how that one is selected, and so it could be a Democrat. Typically, at least one person early in the line of succession will be kept physically away from the others, to guard against such disasters. This isn't very likely, but could possibly happen. Another way would be for Trump or Pence to leave office, and for the remaining one to nominate a Democrat for VP, but that isn't likely either.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes