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Trump Can Block People On Twitter If He Wants, Administration Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The administration of President Donald Trump is scoffing at a lawsuit by Twitter users who claim in a federal lawsuit that their constitutional rights are being violated because the president has blocked them from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle. "It would send the First Amendment deep into uncharted waters to hold that a president's choices about whom to follow, and whom to block, on Twitter -- a privately run website that, as a central feature of its social-media platform, enables all users to block particular individuals from viewing posts -- violate the Constitution." That's part of what Michael Baer, a Justice Department attorney, wrote to the New York federal judge overseeing the lawsuit Friday. In addition, the Justice Department said the courts are powerless to tell Trump how he can manage his private Twitter handle, which has 35.8 million followers.
"To the extent that the President's management of his Twitter account constitutes state action, it is unquestionably action that lies within his discretion as Chief Executive; it is therefore outside the scope of judicial enforcement," Baer wrote. (PDF) Baer added that an order telling Trump how to manage his Twitter feed "would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns by intruding directly into the president's chosen means of communicating to millions of Americans."
"To the extent that the President's management of his Twitter account constitutes state action, it is unquestionably action that lies within his discretion as Chief Executive; it is therefore outside the scope of judicial enforcement," Baer wrote. (PDF) Baer added that an order telling Trump how to manage his Twitter feed "would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns by intruding directly into the president's chosen means of communicating to millions of Americans."
Sounds about right.
The Justice Department is powerless to tell the courts what they can, can't, or must, do.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Trump has made Constitutional lawyers, fact checkers, and news organizations richer.
Table-ized A.I.
Of course he can. It's his personal account.
Within seconds of a tweet being posted, he'll have hundreds of replies, almost instantaneously, from the same people consistently, who always manage to get out 6 part tweets within a few seconds of each other.
Spam, essentially. And what do we do with spam? We block it.
Admittedly that's how most people deal with @realDonaldTrump anyway.
ALl they have to do it SIGN OUT and they can see what he post's. Its not like he banned from the internet or from the site completely. Just another smear campaign against the president they don't like.
I'm not on twitter. It took me exactly 15 seconds to search @realdonaldtrump on a search engine and pull up his Twitter account where I can read his inane babbling all day if I want. It's hard to take Trump's critics seriously when they keep whining about complete nonsense like this.
The Justice Department is powerless to tell the courts what they can, can't, or must, do.
A big part of presenting a position to a court is telling them what they can or can't do. They (and then the appellate courts) have to decide if you're right. You'd be amazed at what portion of legal matters in court involve decisions made by judges where they might rather do something else that might make more sense in a particular case, but they have limited power. In reality, while there are many judges from both sides of the aisle whom we may disagree with from time to time, this restraint is why the notion of the "activist judge" is basically a myth, especially at the federal level.
The courts defer to the executive or Congress on a wide variety of matters. Still, blocking a person prevents them from viewing your tweet and thus from interacting with it, which certainly limits that person's ability to comment on that tweet in a forum with thirty million plus people. It stretches credulity that you could convince a judge that a forum of thirty million people is anything other than a fully public forum, and free speech protections are at their zenith when talking about political matters in a public forum.
The blocked person may have ample alternative avenues for communication, but preventing them from commenting on the basis of their speech is still a content-based restraint on speech and IIRC is presumptively unconstitutional. Still, First Amendment doctrine is a bit labyrinthine and it would take a full briefing to lay out and evaluate the issue fully.
Real lawyers write in C++
Sounds to me like a business opportunity. Build a website whose sole purpose is to post all of Trump's Twitter posts, including those that are in reply to someone else's Twitter post, throw some ads on the site and wait for the money to start rolling in.
Then I am looking forward to my Congressional Rep not being allowed to block me on a whim.
While I don't call people names, etc. I can only imagine what my US House Rep's FB feed is gonna look like when she is required to leave stuff she doesn't like up there.
Caution: Contents under pressure
So the whitehouse staff is claiming that his 5am shitter tweets are official whitehouse policy.... but that his personal account is not official government documentation and thus subject to freedom of speech concerns?
Sorry guys, you cannot have it both ways, either its the depraved private musings of a senile old man on his own personal account
OR
It is official government documentation and policy announcements, and thus you cannot censor whom has access to reply.