Radio News: Judge rules President's Twitter feed can't block

May 23, 2018 10:50 pm
The Hill reports that U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that President Donald Trump’s Twitter account is a public forum, and he can't block anyone. The First Amendment does not permit the president to block citizens, who have access to their own government. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University brought the lawsuit on behalf of seven citizens who were blocked from the @realDonaldTrump account. They all had expressed different opinions then the president in reply tweets before being blocked. Muting is allowed, Buchwald wrote in the ruling, but not blocking. "Muting preserves the muted account’s ability to reply to a tweet sent by the muting account, blocking precludes the blocked user from ‘seeing or replying to the blocking user’s tweets’ entirely,” she wrote. Strangely, Buchwald did not give an unblocking order of any kind. “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... will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional,” Buchwald wrote.