Check out post #111 for some answers.
IT IS NOT HIS PERSONAL ACCOUNT IF HE’S CONDUCTING GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ON IT.
If you’re the dog catcher, don’t do business on your personal account, and the ruling doesn’t apply.
Thank you very well stated.
The “platform” for this speech is owned and operated by Twitter, not the president. And why shouldn’t someone be able to make fun of his tan or his hair, call him a Nazi or incestuous?
These lines are blurred all of the time in small towns. People will call the police chief at home or drive over to the Sheriff’s house to talk to him about something.
Posters keep saying that this is a limited ruling and keep citing what the court said, and I understand it and I can read it. But when courts rule, they must be logically consistent. This ruling sets the groundwork for the next one and so on.
And my concern is the abuse or profanity. Neither are illegal. They are both free speech. I can post a blog all day accusing Trump of being a Nazi or saying he wants to bang his daughter or you name it.
But this ruling goes further. It cites free speech principles for saying that what is ostensibly a personal social media account becomes an official, government one when used for official purposes. Fine.
But the government cannot ban abusive or profane speech, yet that is generally understood to be a feature of any social media account, as Loach described upthread. If on Loach’s social media page, his agency announced a road closure and he must permit abusive and profane responses (e.g. “You pigs quit eating donuts and go out and clear the fucking road!”) he may very well shut it down.
And because his page is a government one, and abusive and profane speech is not illegal, this ruling seems to imply that he must as a matter of law allow the profane and abusive speech or else possibly get a judge to approve of its removal.
It is also a vast expansion of the powers of federal courts over stupid social media accounts. These plaintiffs are not harmed in any meaningful way. They can say what they want on a thousand other platforms, including the SDMB. This litigation is simply a middle finger to Donald Trump and the courts need to see that and stay out of it. The problem is that a lot of judges want to join in giving that middle finger as well.
Oh, well, since Twitter owns it, then it is private action and the court was wrong, no?
That may be technically correct, but not a matter of custom. It is understood that I can customize my social media accounts to exclude people that will harass or abuse me, even though that abuse may be perfectly legal in other contexts.
People should be able to make abusive or profane comments towards the President for any legal reason that they want, but they have no particular right to do it on “his” (meaning what Twitter has permitted him to control) portion of social media, anymore than they can stand in the Oval Office and say the same thing. Time, place, and manner and all that.
Did you read the ruling, or at least the excerpt in post #111?
Twitter owns the platform but isn’t the one that was blocking people.
The fact that the platform is owned by Twitter isn’t really relevant I think. Twitter has a feature that allows you to block people so it appears they are ok with blocking people who make fun of him or for any other reason. Blocking is ok with Twitter. It’s not ok with the court.
Yes that is one of my concerns. That’s the reality of the world today. Government entities use platforms owned by private companies to get out useful and sometimes important information. Road closures are something that we do put out over social media along with other breaking events. As I stated above there is a disclaimer about removing posts that contain profanity and several other things. As of right now I think that covers us still since we are not in the 2nd Circuit but I’m not sure how it affects those that are covered. It appears to be unsettled.
Ok another question that may or may not have an answer in the ruling. If Trump today puts out a tweet saying his realdonaldtrump account is from forever forward only going to be for his own personal thoughts and feelings and official announcements will be on the White House account, would that change anything? Or is this account forever more going to be considered “official?” It’s GQ so just assume he would be able to follow through.
I think it’s a good ruling, and I think it should apply to AOC, or any other politician, too.
I think you’re just giving the middle finger to the First Amendment simply because Trump is involved, so accusations of bias can go both ways.
In general, do you believe the government has a right to curtail exercise of First Amendment rights because the speech is uncivil?
By the way, here are the actual tweets from the people who Trump blocked.
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-3%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20C.pdf
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-4%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20D.pdf
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-5%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20E.pdf
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-7%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20G.pdf
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-8%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20H.pdf
https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Cases/Twitter/ECF%20No.%2033-6%20-%20Stipulation%20Ex.%20F.pdf
I just did a quick skim of these, and while they are strongly opinionated, I see nothing that would approach the line of abusive and certainly not obscene. Just to pick one tweet as a flavor of what these all seem to be:
I would submit that if someone doesn’t want to be criticized in this way, they have zero place in public life.
Keeping it more towards the ruling and possible clarifications from a higher court, I think when you break it down to one individual tweet or message it’s easy to say that free speech must be protected at all costs. What it doesn’t take into account is the reality of social media and the methods of modern communications. It may not come from this case but lines will be drawn with regard to acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
But it is also trivially easy to ignore unwanted communications without impacting anyone’s First Amendment rights.
For example, let’s say someone sends annoying letters to a congressman’s office. I think they have a right to send them and should not be blocked from doing so; but that doesn’t mean that the congressman has to read them.
Similarly, a politician doesn’t have to scroll through their twitter feeds to see what people are saying about him in responses. They can also just scroll down past tweets they don’t like, like every single other twitter user.
Absolutely correct. The 2nd Circuit explained why by analogizing it to the government renting a building. Just because it doesn’t own the building, it doesn’t mean that the government can deny people their rights inside it.
Can you disable all comments? That is absolutely viewpoint neutral but still allows you to broadcast messages on social media. If the problem is that it doesn’t allow you to collect the favorable comments that you want without also getting the critical comments, well, that’s the rub. The government can’t really do that.
This is somewhat tricky. I’ll credit your hypothetical by assuming that the president follows through on his promise as best as any person could. That would also require, in my humble opinion, not using any government staff to run the account. (Right now, the account is partially run by his press secretary and other government staffers.) I think he would also need to scrub the account of any trace of official actions. Those tweets belong in the national archive, but not in his “private account” for only select people to see and interact with. Perhaps, in that case, he could reclaim this as a private account.
However, as I noted when discussing AOC’s similar but different account, the president is weird. The country’s executive authority is vested solely in him. If he were to tweet out from his “public” account that “all federal employees have a paid day off tomorrow. Merry Christmas in July!,” that proclamation would be vested with his full authority to give everyone a day off. If he were to issue the same statement from his “personal” account, it has the exact same authority because that authority is vested in him. It’s not that one Twitter account has the authority and the other lacks it. So, the issue is, how long does his “private” account have to remain purely private before he is entitled to the absolute, irrebuttable presumption that nothing he says on the account is an “official action”? Well, the most-confidence inspiring answer is when he is no longer president, there can be no ambiguity. Any time before that, there is always the potential for him to use it for official purposes, and thus, no person should be hindered interacting with the account on the basis of their viewpoints so everyone shares the same opportunity to interact with the president regardless of their viewpoints.
There’s another problem with his trying to use it as a purely personal account - it’s not fully in his control. Other people can interact with him on Twitter and they can raise official matters and advocate for public policies as they choose. If Trump gives some people preferential access to his personal account on the basis of their shared viewpoints, those people will be better able to express their policy preferences to him. (This same argument applies to AOC. For what it’s worth, I think the best policy for her would be to not engage in viewpoint discrimination either).
Right, but the problem will be in the enforcement and the fact that you have to pay lawyers to litigate the issue.
If on your social media page you have a guy that both: 1) politely and articulately disagrees with the actions of your department, yet also, 2) calls your mother and your wife nasty names, and you ban him, he will claim that his banning was a result of #1 and cite this case as precedent. Your department gets to pay lawyers to go through pages of posts to show that “See, we didn’t ban this guy; didn’t ban that guy!”
Or if you promote the agency bake sale next month, why didn’t you let the guy say that you could make $20k working from home? You only want your commercial speech allowed!
That is the main problem; not the case law that comes out of it. For every Circuit Court decision and definitely Supreme Court decision, there are thousands of other people out there that settle with monetary damages because they cannot afford to litigate these matters or simply wish them to go away. Those are the real consequences of court decisions that claim to only decide a particular issue.
I would think that would be governed by the venerable legal principle, " The proof of the pudding is in the eating." 
If he truly changed his posting habits, never mentioned any federal policies, never mentioned his administrion, never used the twitter account to give operational instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, never mentioned “fake news” as a response to posts about his policy, that would be significant.
And if he instead just used his twitter account like any other semi-retired granddad, to post about his golf game, brag about his grandkids’ performances in the school play, and the occasional kitty pic and snapshot of the sunset at Mar-el-Lago - in short, if he changed so it was a purely, truly personal Twitter account, that would be significant.
And, if any time someone posted about his administration, whether favourably or dissing, he had a stock reply: “This is my purely personal Twitter account and is not meant to discuss political issues. If you wish to post something about my Administration, please do so on the official White House twitter account.” That too would be significant.
But if he just posts that this is his personal Twitter account, and then carries on in the same way as he has since he was inaugerated, I would bet that the courts would say that it’s a functional test, and he’s still using it to communicate his political views and declarations of policy. Meaningless disclaimer cannot negate the First amendment.
If one opposes this ruling, one supports blocking a person who did 1 and not 2.
Politicians deal with all sorts of actual crap all the time, from people making death threats, to having milkshakes thrown on them, to being harassed at restaurants. Really, people criticizing politicians on Twitter is a non-concern for 99% of politicians. After all, the politicians themselves are often saying as hateful things as the people who respond to them. Making interaction with the unwashed masses out to be a major headache is to be completely out of touch with how actual public figures interact the vast majority of the time.
What’s your point? That there’s no bright line here? That’s just the way things work sometimes.
Sometimes it does and must. But sometimes the courts can stay out of things where there are no judicially manageable standards or it would cause a shift in the balance of power.
Instead of creating a new free speech right to post on someone’s social media account, the court could realize that this new regime will necessarily involve absurdly complex issues, balance it against the really de minimis intrusion on freedom of speech and stay out of it.
Trump is the one who made his personal account an official channel of communication of the White House. Now he has to play by the rules.