Is Trump Violating the First Amendment by Blocking People on Twitter? – Vanity Fair

By Win McNamee/Getty.

Even Donald Trump, who plans to stop tweeting approximately never and may even live-tweet during former F.B.I. director James Comeys testimony on Thursday like its an episode of The Bachelor, doesnt want everyone following him on Twitter. Like any half-sane person on the social-media platform, he has blocked a number of people from seeing or responding to his tweets. Unlike the rest of us, however, Trump is also president of the United States, and, as White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday, Trump tweets should be considered official statements by the president. Which means that Trump may be violating the First Amendment rights of the people he has blocked.

Thats the argument being made by lawyers for two Twitter users who were blocked by the president, closing off access to what they say he is using as an official, public platform. This Twitter account operates as a designated public forum for First Amendment purposes, and accordingly the viewpoint-based blocking of our clients is unconstitutional, nonprofit organization Knight First Amendment Institute said in a letter to Trump on Tuesday. We ask that you unblock them and any others who have been blocked for similar reasons. Some legal experts are more dubious. Ken White, a First Amendment expert and former assistant U.S. attorney, says he finds the case ridiculous. Theres also an argument to be made that Trump is merely behaving within the terms of service of Twitter, a privately held company.

Whatever the merits of the case, it is undeniable that Twitter has become a central feature of the Trump presidency, and one of its greatest vulnerabilities. White House aides and allies have implored Trump to stop tweeting, to vet his posts with a lawyer first, or to at least limit what has become a deeply self-destructive habit. The tweeting makes everybody crazy, Trumps close friend Tom Barrack, the chairman of Colony Northstar, said at a Bloomberg conference this week. Theres just no gain in doing it.

In the past few days alone, he has attacked the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, after a terrorist attack that left seven dead, and appeared to undermine his own legal teams efforts to defend his immigration executive order before the Supreme Court, using a tweet to call it a TRAVEL BAN and drawing a remarkable rebuke from Kellyanne Conways husband, George, who noted on Twitter that the presidents online posts may have sabotaged his own case. Voters want Trump to stop tweeting, too: a new Politico poll says that 69 percent of voters say the president uses Twitter too much. Fifty-nine percent say his Twitter habit is a bad thing, and even 53 percent of G.O.P. voters say he should cut down on his use of the platform.

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Is Trump Violating the First Amendment by Blocking People on Twitter? - Vanity Fair