That is quite the pickle for the argument.
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All I know is - come Thursday- he’s going to be on Twitter denying crooked Hillary’s nonexistent statements that he blows goats, announcing that he’s diverting Medicaid dollars to pay for his beautiful wall or that he’s invading Albania to get back Old Shoe.
Anything to distract from the hearings.
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A president is openly behaving like one of the madder Roman emperors and still has a 40% approval rating. So, the weapon of choice is to stick lawyers on him for deleting tweets, because Constitution.
How Very 21st Century American on all sides! Team effort! Well done, all!
(slow clap)
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If I understood well, the issue is that blocking users, they can’t see anymore 45’s tweets, not that they can’t answer to him. He should silence them (on Twitter, not in real life!)
Being blocked by the Orange one is a badge of honour, the best I’ve managed is the odious Bryan Fischer.
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Blocked users can log out or go anonymous in their browser to see Trump’s tweets if they really want to.
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As anonymous, they can’t forward or comment his tweets. So they are silenced. I think this is the issue. I don’t think anyone is claiming Trump should be forced to read their comments at his tweets, but the point is that if he can or not effectively prevent them to comment on his tweets (IANAL)
[edited for better phrasing]
If someone really wants to forward or comment on his tweets, they can embed links directly to tweets that they can’t otherwise see when logged in. It’s more difficult, but I don’t know what the threshold is for violating the First Amendment is in this regard.
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If this is the thing that these particular lawyers are good at, I say good on them. A Twitter thread, while stupid, is a de facto bounded forum. Direct responses to a tweet enter that forum for the millions of followers to see. Blocking people from that high profile “space” does constrict their access to the national conversation.
Blocking idividuals for rudeness or uselessness wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but a pattern of blocking massive amount of users based on their political beliefs is a more serious issue, and does amount to severely constricting the shape of the conversation. It was Trump who decided that this he was going to hold a persistent townhall meeting. No ither president has had the means or fucked up weirdness necessary to do so, but that doesn’t mean that that isn’t what this s.
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What happens when Americans block Trump on Twitter?
(I don’t Twitter. Does he get a “Joe Shmoe has blocked you” message?)
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by my count its 435,234,591 things…and counting.
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Eh, this really seems low on the totem pole of things to get worked up about, and things like this make people dismiss the left for crying that every little slight is a violation of the constitution. It makes claims about his actual crimes against the constitution seem less powerful.
In this case, I don’t even buy the argument. The government is not preventing any individuals from posting thoughts on their own Twitter accounts – they have all the free speech they want on Twitter, just not specifically as replies to Cheeto’s own tweets. Likewise, you don’t have the right stand up on stage next to The Cheeto and share his mic to respond to every inane thing he says, but there’s nothing preventing you from rebutting him while further away from him.
I don’t know… Let’s step back and look at the public forum analogy. Does the president have to allow every American into every speech he gives? Is the president required to give a speaking platform to every American when he speaks? If that’s not the case in the real world, why would it be the case in the digital?
I don’t agree with the argument these folks are making, but it’s a perfectly cromulent constitutional question in the abstract, and “discussing” such things isn’t getting in the way of anyone’s resistance to Trump.
Someday Trump will be gone, and with luck we’ll still have both a working internet and a Constitution, and the question of whether and how and to what extent elected officials can police their social media accounts will still matter.
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Have to back you up on that. Even if his tweets are “official” the communication system is privately operated. Just like we don’t have a “right” to communicate back through our televisions during news conferences, we don’t have a right to force anyone to listen to us on Twitter, Facebook, etc. As for our Constitutional right to free speech, we still have that. No one is being charged with a crime for tweeting in response to Trump’s tweets. He has the right to ignore us on Twitter, just like he can ignore our emails, letters, phone calls, etc. Just like every previous President has.
This strip is getting a lot of mileage right now:
Is it? I was getting the impression that this centered around the “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” part of the First Amendment. Specifically that communicating via Twitter turns his Twitter feed into the equivalent of an open forum like a town hall, which should be open to all.
Note, that i’m not a lawyer either, but i don’t exactly buy these arguments either. Neither the way i understood it yesterday, which is the way @danimagoo explains it, nor the way i think i understand it now.
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The issue isn’t the ownership of the communication system; it’s the obligations of public servants.
As much as Trump even hates to think about it, he’s a public servant and he works for the American people.
So: Suppose you work for an organization, and you have control of one of the organization’s Twitter feeds. And suppose you decide that you’re going to block access for a bunch of people you don’t like, including some of the people responsible for giving you your performance review. Is the organization justified in telling you, “This is in violation of our policies. Either open up the Twitter feed, or turn it over to someone that’s willing to follow policy?”
There are a lot of different factors to consider, but it’s clearly something that the HR department would want to look into, even if they eventually decide that you’re justified in blocking those users.
Anyway, that’s where things stand today. The KFAI is asking for the government equivalent of an HR review. We’re going to be seeing a lot of these reviews over the next few years, and Trump should be glad that the stakes are so low on this one.
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Yeah, my brain wasn’t even considering that part of the Amendment. Interesting. This would actually probably be a useful issue to get a ruling on, because Twitter and social media aren’t going away anytime soon.
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I think that’s a simplistic view of things. For one thing, just because the system is privately operated doesn’t necessarily mean Trump can block people. It means Twitter can can do whatever it likes to accounts that are mean to Trump if they so choose. It doesn’t necessarily mean Trump can block people from the official POTUS account. That’s the official presidential twitter feed.
Now, certainly we have no right to communicate directly to the president, but twitter replies also serve as a public forum. People communicate with each other that way. If Trump blocks someone, they’re no longer able to be part of that conversation. That’s a member of government selectively silencing people he doesn’t like on an official government account. I think there’s an argument for censorship there.
Now, his personal account, that’s another story. If we believe Spicer that tweets from Trump’s personal account are official White House releases, some of the same problems might apply.
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The only sure way to stop this stuff is to give democrats the majority in congress next year.
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