Judge Rules Trump Can’t Block People on Twitter

Don’t understand this. Blocking a person does not prevent the followers of said person to see the conversation , thus it’s not a public forum?

I feel pretty conflicted on this. The way Trump is using his Twitter, it almost becomes public property. I mean he's making huge announcements, almost solely on Twitter. So, at that point, it's almost like denying public access to the State of the Union. But, on the other hand, it's his damn Twitter and he should be able to do whatever he wants with it.

I guess it begs the question, when you're a "public servant", and you use your social media as a medium, are you entitled to privacy in the same way a standard citizen is? Or does that medium become public property? It's probably best that "public servants" don't use their private materials in an official capacity.

[edit] switched public capacity to official.

I agree that it's kind of a questionable decision but my understanding of it is, people can normally post public replies to tweets- but if the user blocks you, you can't post your public reply. OK (and desirable) for most people, not ok for the government to do.

There's not necessarily a perfect offline equivalent but it would sort of be like if the president tried to forbid a newspaper from running an editorial next to the text of a presidential speech- obviously unconstitutional. (not a perfect comparison because twitter users who are blocked can and do get around it by screenshotting or just linking to the tweet even though they can't reply to it)

I think the more interesting part of this is the ruling that the president's "personal" twitter account is an official government instrument.

Has the judge read some of the comments being made? Absolute craziness in there. Some accounts should absolutely be blocked, they are repeatedly spamming and saying things you would never say in a meeting face to face.

-EDIT- Funny that my comment is being down-voted. Seen everyone wants to moderate comments. If someone says something you don't like on your personal page, you should be able to stop that. You've just exercise your rights to drop my comment to the bottom.

You can kind of get around this by viewing the site while logged out. But I don't know if that kind of thing is supported in any of the apps, so it's a big hoop to jump through.