First Amendment Group Threatens to Sue Trump for Blocking Twitter Trolls

By Don Irvine.

 

President Trump is being threatened with legal action if he doesn’t unblock the Twitter accounts of trolls (critics) who have lost access to his account after they were blocked.

The Knight First Amendment Institute sent a letter to the President asking him to unblock the accounts of his critics or “face legal action to protect the First Amendment rights of the blocked individual.” The letter went on to say:

“The President’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, is a ‘designated public forum’ subject to the First Amendment, according to the Knight Institute. The First Amendment bars the government from excluding individuals from a designated public forum because of their views. The Knight Institute asked the President to unblock its clients, or to direct his subordinates to do so.

‘This is a context in which the Constitution precludes the President from making up his own rules,’ said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. ‘Though the architects of the Constitution surely didn’t contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable. Having opened this forum to all comers, the President can’t exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what they’re saying.’”

Maybe the Knight Institute forgot that politicians and celebrities block Twitter accounts all the time, and that being blocked doesn’t infringe on users’ First Amendment rights as they can easily use their own accounts or even the official presidential Twitter account @POTUS to comment on Trump’s policies and performance. Plus, the Institute is focusing on the unblocking of two particular accounts—one of which belongs to a March for Truth organizer.

The President has the right—just like any other individual—to communicate or not communicate with anyone he wants to. If he chooses to block Twitter trolls he is free to do so, especially if he does it from his personal account, which the government neither set up nor controls.

What the Knight Institute is really upset about—as are their fellow liberals—is that Trump has managed to use Twitter to bypass the anti-Trump narrative of the liberal media, and that is driving them crazy.

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