Second Circuit Confusion
The NYT reports:
President Trump has been violating the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account because they criticized or mocked him, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
Trump’s lawyers initially argued that Trump’s blocking was the action of a private individual, but that argument quickly fell apart. The ruling correctly observes (and Trump’s lawyers quickly conceded) that Trump uses his Twitter account for official government business — announcing policies, nominations, appointments. The rules regarding restrictions on viewpoint discrimination in public spaces, the Court argues, must apply.
The core of the Court’s argument is that by blocking accounts, Trump has limited a person’s speech in a public forum.
A blocked account is prevented from viewing any of the President’s tweets, replying to those tweets, retweeting them, or liking them.
A blocked account is prevented. But a blocked person is not.¹
The Court makes much of the workarounds people can do to view and interact with his tweets, describing them as verbosely as possible and rejecting them all as “burdensome.” Opening a new account is burdensome, the Court claims, even though doing so takes less than two minutes. Is that too much work for these plaintiffs? If so, just open a private browsing window. It literally takes less than one second.² Add another two seconds to navigate to his Twitter account. Then you can view Trump’s stream of banality unhindered.³
The NYT refers to Twitter comments as a “digital town hall,” a curious metaphor. Blocking Twitter accounts is not like preventing individuals from protesting during a town hall meeting. It’s more like telling them to protest outside so the speaker doesn’t have to listen, for a blocked account can still criticize or mock the president elsewhere on Twitter. That is, it limits the blocking person’s engagement with an antagonist, but not the speech of that antagonist. And for a social media site with a lot of antagonistic speech, the ability to block accounts is socially necessary.
Until Citizens United 2.0 declares that accounts are people too, with free speech rights, blocking Twitter accounts should remain standard practice for any Twitter user, including Trump.
[1] Twitter’s loose coupling of accounts with persons is different than Facebook’s. Twitter makes it easy for a single person to have multiple Twitter accounts.
[2] In Firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+P. In Chrome, press Ctrl+Shift+N. Or you can right-click on a link and select “Open link in New Private Window.” Again, not burdensome.
[3] If each plaintiff pays $1000 to a charity of my choice, I’ll even write a Firefox plugin that injects Trump’s tweets into your timeline and let’s you easily tweet screenshots of Trump’s tweets.
