President Donald Trump absolutely loves to post. The man lusts for posting. Whether or not you agree with the guy, you can’t dispute he’s the most online president in history. Sure, Barack Obama revolutionised digital organising in politics, but he doesn’t have the same intuitive sense of the insane febrility which makes up maybe 99% of the internet’s content as Trump does. However, this extreme onlineness has led Trump to perform the most online of actions: blocking people who annoy him.
That was totally fine when he was just a rich Manhattan socialite and reality TV ghoul, but it has stirred a bit of controversy now that he is the leader of the free world. And it seems like at least one US court agrees that it’s a bit naff –a district court in New York has ruled that it is unconstitutional for Trump to block people.
BREAKING: President Trump’s blocking of critics on Twitter is unconstitutional, court rules. https://t.co/8fZ6cdKbAL pic.twitter.com/47a0yNYYkb
— Knight First Amendment Institute (@knightcolumbia) May 23, 2018
United States district judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that Trump can’t block people on Twitter because it violates their First Amendment right to participate in a “public forum”.
The case was brought bu advocacy group the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented nine plaintiffs who claimed that Trump blocking them was a violation of the law. The plaintiffs were largely blocked before Trump became president, and anecdotally it does seem like Trump really slowed down the blocking once he took higher office.
Their reasons for being blocked vary, but it is extremely funny to see them repeated in the global newspapers of record. Take this, from The Guardian:
Dan Ozzi is an author and music journalist who was blocked by Trump in 2014, after he joked that it would be funny to use his face as a toilet.
Magnificent.
The reason this has become problematic is that Trump has maintained use of his personal Twitter account – @realdonaldtrump – after becoming president, and uses it for most of his of off-the-cuff communications and unhinged ramblings. It’s unlikely that his more ‘official’ @POTUS handle is doing much blocking, but that account basically just tweets press releases and retweets his main account.
The judge issued what is called a ‘declaratory relief’ which intended to merely state the point of the law as it exists, not to enforce it. That means the judge hasn’t ordered Trump to unblock people – she’s just indicating to him that he should do so in order to be fully compliant:
Because no government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the president and [digital director Dan] Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional.
So, big day if you’re blocked by Trump on Twitter but also want to read his tweets. I mean, you could open any newspaper, where they are reported and repeated ad infinitum, but maybe you need it straight from the horse’s mouth.
