171–180 of 352 posts
Isn't there a caveat? The article (unlike the headline) says "blocking people based on political speech" is forbidden. However, he is still free to block trolls right?
Even if true, that's a totally subjective standard that can't be applied consistently. One person's "political speech" is another person's "troll."
https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/17/fbi-apprehends-troll-for...
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> And given that blocking is part and parcel to the app, it would seem like everyone is buying into the terms of the environment when they start using it That isn't how this works. Just because Twitter allows people to block stuff, doesn't mean Trump gets to block stuff. In a "normal" government, they'd pick a vendor with software that would let them make official policy statements in a way that complied with the law…
Oh common. Spam and a harassment is a problem. Let the people he blocks make a new account to follow him or open an incognito window.
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?
Blocking on Twitter also prevents the blocked user from view the blocker's timeline, which means Trump would be preventing US citizens from viewing his "public statements" Edit: Is this being downvoted because of some inferred snark? None was intended.
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If your account gets banned, you're unable to communicate with the government (since it is established that Twitter is the president's official communication medium). Wouldn't it thus be a violation of the first amendment?
You can still communicate with the government using official channels and you can still view his tweets. His account is basically write-only so you’re only losing your ability to send messages which won’t be read.
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Not just government officials - it seems like the same logic would apply to celebrities like Alyssa Milano who use their twitter almost exclusively as a political campaign forum.
That's not the same thing. Celebrities are not elected officials representing constituents. Perhaps if someone is actually running for office it makes a difference, but I'm not sure when these sorts of laws kick in.
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Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts? I don't see how anyone, president or otherwise, can't chose whom they send messages to.
He can certainly send private emails, Slack messages, or even Twitter DMs. What he can't do is publicly broadcast his tweets to the world, and then exclude people from them on political grounds.
Pretty sure he can't and if he is, he better be complying with federal records laws or else he'd be living a double standard. You may recall him blasting another, very popular candidate in the 2016 election for using personal email to conduct official business. Using slack / private email / twitter DM's is basically the same damn thing.
Hard to grasp the logic here.
Trump has multiple twitter accounts. His primary one is @realDonaldTrump, which he's been using since 2009, long before he was a government figure. This is his private citizen Twitter account, as far as I'm concerned, and he can do whatever he damn well pleases there. If he were to block people from his @POTUS President Donald Trump account, then I might take issue with that.
@realDonaldTrump is his official account, as per whitehouse.gov [1]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20180523194453/https://www.whiteh...
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If your account gets banned, you're unable to communicate with the government (since it is established that Twitter is the president's official communication medium). Wouldn't it thus be a violation of the first amendment?
> If your account gets banned.... Wouldn't it thus be a violation of the first amendment? Not unless the government is the entity doing the banning (or collaborating with Twitter to ban accounts at its request). If the government ran its own Mastodon instance, then there would be an argument to be made that it couldn't ban users on that Mastodon instance, depending on the nature of that Mastodon instance and what it'…
But twitter is working with the government in hosting the tweets and thus assumes responsibility to provide a public square, in which case it cannot ban people.
Otherwise government should be banned from using twitter because by picking a private company to put government messages on, the government official (in this case Trump) is picking that company's existing policy (what ever it may be) as a means of banning people, which the government isn't allowed to do.
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IANAL, but yes, I think that's OK, because it's not blocking based on the content of the speech, which is the crucial part.
How is the content the crucial part? Free speech is about free speech, not discriminating on content. It is both illegal for the government to shut down leftist newspapers, and illegal for the government to shut down all newspapers. The idiocy of this is making shutting down a newspaper equivalent to twitter blocking, but if you draw the analogy, that's what you wind up with.