A plaintiff complained that being unable to mock the president’s tweets affected her “as a public intellectual.”
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Donald Trump can’t block people from viewing his Twitter feed over their political views. From The Hill:
Aside from the potential for political motivations (which seem to plague federal judges in the Trump era), one is tempted to also chalk up this ruling to the fact there’s a long history of judges and lawmakers doing silly things because they don’t really understand how the internet works.
For one, “blocking” a user doesn’t really prevent them from seeing what the president is tweeting at all. All one has to do it log out of your Twitter account (or use Twitter in a web browser set to incognito mode) to see what the president has written, never mind, that news agencies around the world instantly report almost everything he says. Anyone who has tried to extract even basic information from, say, the local City Hall, understands that this is a very low bar to clear to see what a public official is writing. Blocking doesn’t interfere with public transparency in any meaningful way.
The judge is also assuming that for legal purposes Twitter’s platform is a “designated public forum,” and the law here is unclear at best. (Ethics and Public Policy Center legal expert Ed Whelan seems rightly skeptical of the judges reasoning; for more on this point, see his Twitter thread here .) But assuming this decision were to stand, it would appear to apply to all public officials who use Twitter to discuss their work, and their are a host of troubling secondary questions that arise.
Waht’s most curious about the ruling is that it appears to be saying citizens have a right to piggyback on Trump’s twitter feed to amplify their own opinions. Which is ludicrous. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit was Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, who at the time covered “Trump and the law” at Pacific Standard magazine. (She now writes for the Daily Kos .) She was blocked by the president in June 2017 after she responded to a tweet in which the president intimated that the media tried to keep him from winning the White House by saying, “To be fair you didn’t win the WH: Russia won it for you.” Some 9,000 Twitter useers “liked” her tweet.
After she was blocked, Buckwalter-Poza’s wrote a piece headlined “Trump Blocked Me on Twitter and It’s Costing Me My Career” that appeared on Fortune’ s website. “Even though I knew @realDonaldTrump was important to my career,” she writes, “it still took me at least a few days to recognize how being blocked by the president on Twitter would affect me as a public intellectual.” It’s unclear that what’s publicly on display here is Buckwalter-Poza’s intellect, but she went on to explain herself this way:
In other words, Buckwalter-Poza is arguing that being able to mock the president is essential to her career because it impresses her journalistic peers. What this says about the state of journalism is depressing, but the fact that a federal judge bought some version of this logic is downright disturbing. It’s further worth noting that this lawsuit was sponsored by the prestigious Knight Foundation, which “supports ideas that promote quality journalism.”
Naturally, Buckwalter-Poza is on Twitter crowing, “I sued the President, and I won.” This is technically true, but anyone concerned about free expression and media credibility in an era where the president shouts “fake news!” to the approval of tens of millions of voters shouldn’t consider this a victory.
