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Should the President Be Allowed to Block You on Twitter?

Josh Haner/The New York Times/Redux

President Trump has long used Twitter to communicate directly with Americans.

President Trump has 54 million followers on Twitter. He uses the social media platform to announce policies, attack political adversaries, and promote his administration’s accomplishments.

He has also blocked some of his critics from his Twitter account. The exact number of people blocked by Trump is unknown, but free speech groups say it’s at least in the hundreds.

Last year, seven Twitter users who said they’d been unfairly blocked from following Trump’s account after they criticized the president filed a lawsuit saying their First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. In May, a federal judge agreed, ruling that Trump’s habit of blocking his critics from what is effectively a digital public forum is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling, so the legal battle will continue.

Here, two experts—one from a conservative think tank, the other from a group that defends First Amendment freedoms—debate whether the president should be allowed to block his critics.

The president should be able to block you on Twitter, just like anyone else with a Twitter account. The federal judge who held that the president violated the First Amendment by blocking certain followers on his account was wrong.

The First Amendment, which says that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” prevents censorship of Americans by the government. But Twitter isn’t the government; it’s a private social media company, so First Amendment protections don’t apply in the same way.

Some people have argued that Twitter is, in effect, a “public forum” since it’s a medium by which so many people disseminate and receive news and information. That reasoning doesn’t hold water: To be considered “public,” the forum has to be owned or controlled by the government, like a public park or a street corner.

As a private company, Twitter, not the government, controls the accounts of its 300 million users, including Donald Trump. As its terms of service outline, Twitter “may suspend or terminate your account . . . at any time for any or no reason.” So even though the president can block individuals from his own account, Twitter has the ultimate control of @realDonaldTrump.

Twitter is a private social media company, not a public forum.

But don’t American citizens have the right to criticize their president? Of course. Anyone blocked by President Trump may say whatever they choose about him on their own Twitter accounts, or anywhere else on social media for that matter, providing they don’t violate the rules that those media have put in place for their users.

The First Amendment, however, doesn’t require Trump or anyone else to “listen” to criticism, and that’s what the Twitter blocking is really about. Trump has the right to decide who will have access to his account, just like all other users. The fact that he is the president doesn’t change that.

 

—HANS VON SPAKOVSKY

Senior Legal Fellow, The Heritage Foundation

One of the core functions of the First Amendment is to protect “We the People” against government censorship.

When the government opens up a space for the public to speak, it cannot, under the First Amendment, exclude some people from speaking there simply because the government doesn’t like what they have to say. Though the country’s Founders couldn’t have imagined presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the president must not be allowed to banish some views from public discussions simply because he finds them objectionable.

This “public forum” principle applies to digital spaces like Twitter just as it does to physical gatherings like town halls or school board meetings. President Trump often begins his day by announcing important information on Twitter, such as the resignation of a Cabinet member, the appointment of a new F.B.I. director, or his views on Congress. This information instantaneously reaches his 54 million followers, and it often sparks a discussion among them and others on the tweet’s comments thread.  

Many public officials are using social media to talk to their constituents.

But when the president blocks a user, that person can no longer reply directly to the president, and other users can’t see the blocked person’s replies in the stream of reactions to the president’s original tweet. The blocked user is excluded from the main current of the political dialogue.

This is an example of an old legal concept known as “viewpoint discrimination.” Traditionally, judges have interpreted the First Amendment as prohibiting viewpoint discrimination by the government, even when the conversation occurs on a privately owned platform.

The reason this issue is important is because so many public officials—Democratic, Republican, and otherwise—are using social media to talk to their constituents and to hear their constituents’ views. The more that Twitter and Facebook become important public spaces where people communicate with their elected officials, the more important it is that core First Amendment principles aren’t left behind.

 

—KATIE FALLOW

Senior Attorney, Knight First Amendment Institute

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