Posted on 05/26/2018 5:41:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Trump may not block even rude or obnoxious criticism from his Twitter account, because it is a public forum that is protected by the First Amendment, US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald has ruled. The President’s use of his Twitter account to comment on important policy, personnel and personal announcements made it a public forum, akin to a park or town square, she concluded.
Blocking unwanted tweets is thus viewpoint discrimination, which public officials are not permitted to engage in. Indeed, his Twitter account is not just a public forum. It is also “government space,” and thus may not be closed off, Judge Buchwald continued – rejecting a Justice Department argument that, since Twitter is a public company, it is beyond the reach of First Amendment public forum rules.
Free speech proponents hailed the ruling as a groundbreaking decision, saying it expands constitutional protections deep within the realms of social media. The executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection called it “a critical victory in preserving free speech in the digital age.” Blocking people from responding critically to presidential tweets is unconstitutional, because it prevents them from participating personally and directly in that forum, others said.
The Justice Department said it disagreed with the decision and was considering its next steps. A better suggestion: Embrace the decision. Expand on it. Assess how these District Court principles and free speech guidelines can be applied other vital free speech arenas. Take it as far as you can.
Some will then predictably want to construe the decision narrowly, saying it applies only to government officials, perhaps especially conservatives who support this president. Conservatives, the White House and the Trump Administration need not and should not be bound by such self-serving assertions.
As Supreme Court and numerous lower court decisions have interpreted the Civil Rights Act and other laws, no person may employ race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status or other categories, to discriminate in admissions, hiring or anything else under any program or activity receiving any form of federal financial assistance, including loans or scholarships. Those that do discriminate will lose their Internal Revenue Service non-profit status and their government funding.
Should that list of categories not include one of the most vital and fundamental civil rights of all – the one addressed and protected by the very first amendment to the United States Constitution? The right of free speech and free assembly, especially regarding one’s beliefs, interests and political viewpoints, and one’s ability to participate in discourse and debate over important political and public policy matters?
Our colleges and universities were once society’s crucible for developing and thrashing out ideas. Sadly, as anyone with a milligram of brain matter can attest, they have become bastions of one-sided ideological propaganda and intolerance. Every conceivable element of “diversity” is permitted and encouraged – nay, demanded – except for that most vital and fundamental civil right of free speech and open, robust debate.
That right now applies only to liberal-progressive-leftist views and ideologies. Anything that challenges or questions those teachings is vilified, denounced and silenced, often violently – as being hurtful, hateful, objectionable or intolerable to liberals. Faculty members are hired, protected, promoted or fired based on their social, scientific or political beliefs. Viewpoint discrimination, bullying and mobbing are rampant.
It’s time for pushback. Judicial and Executive Branch decisions and guidelines hold that even private universities that receive federal money for faculty research, student loans and scholarships, or campus facilities, are subject to Civil Rights Act rules. Presidents, administrators and faculty members of public universities are arguably public officials. Campuses and classrooms are clearly public forums.
If they tolerate or encourage viewpoint bullying, mobbing or violence, they are violating the civil rights of students, professors and speakers whose views have been deemed inappropriate, discomforting, hurtful or intolerable to the fragile sensitivities of climate alarmist, pro-abortion, atheist and other liberal factions.
Judge Buchwald’s ruling and the reactions of free speech advocates provide useful guidelines to buttress this approach. The Trump Administration, state attorneys general and free-speech/individual rights organizations should apply them to help restore intellectual rigor and open discourse to our campuses.
The ruling and reactions could also help expand constitutional protections even more deeply in the realms of digital age social media. As they suggest, today’s most popular social media sites have become our most vibrant and essential public forums: today’s parks, town squares and town halls. People, especially millennials, rely on them for news, information and opinions, often as substitutes for print, radio and television (and classrooms). But they now seem far better at censorship than at education or discussion.
Google algorithms increasingly and systematically send climate realism articles to intellectual Siberia. Unless you enter very specific search terms (author’s name, article title and unique wording), those sly algorithms make it difficult or impossible to find articles expressing non-alarmist viewpoints.
Google thus allies with the manmade climate cataclysm establishment – which has received billions of taxpayer dollars from multiple government agencies, but has blocked Climate Armageddon skeptics from getting articles published in scientific journals that often publish papers that involve hidden data, computer codes and other work. Even worse, it facilitates repeated threats that skeptics should be jailed (Bill Nye the Science Guy and RFK Jr.), prosecuted under RICO racketeering laws (Senators Warren and Whitehouse), or even executed (University of Graz, Austria Professor Richard Parncutt).
Google is a private entity, there are other search engines, and those seeking complete, honest research results should see if those alternatives are any better. But there is something repugnant about mankind’s vast storehouses of information being controlled by hyper-partisan techies, in league with equally partisan university, deep state, deep media, hard green and other über-liberal, intolerant elements of our society.
Meanwhile, Google YouTube continues to use its power and position to block posting of and access to equally important information, including over 40 well-crafted, informative, carefully researched Prager University videos – because they contain what YouTube reviewers (censors) decreed is “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional principles, environmental topics and public policy.
Scholar-educator Dennis Prager sued YouTube for closing down yet another vital public forum to views that question, contest or simply fail to pay homage to liberal ideologies and agendas.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh concluded that YouTube did indeed apply vague standards and the arbitrary judgments of a few employees, and did indeed discriminate against Prager U by denying it access to this popular social media platform and digital public forum. However, she ruled that Google YouTube is a private company, and thus is under no obligation to be fair, to apply its services equally, or to refrain from imposing penalties on viewpoints with which its partisan officers and employees disagree.
In other words, YouTube may operate as a public forum but it is a private business and thus may discriminate as it wishes – since it does not bake cakes or provide food or overnight accommodations … or deal with any civil rights that Judge Koh wants to include among protected constitutional rights.
These actions are the hallmarks of communist, fascist and other totalitarian regimes that seek to control all thought, speech, economic activity and other aspects of our lives. They drive policies that further limit our freedoms, kill countless jobs, and cost us billions or trillions of dollars in lost productivity.
The Left is clearly afraid of conservative ideas and principles. It refuses to participate in discussions or debates that it might lose, and instead resorts to mobbing, bullying and violence to silence our voices.
Up to now, lower courts have not always been supportive of the analysis and prescriptions presented in this article. But appellate courts and the Supreme Court have yet to weigh in on the Trump Twitter, Prager YouTube, Google search bias and similar cases. So we are still in uncharted territory.
Conservatives, climate chaos skeptics and true free speech advocates should help create the legal precedents, while also pressing forward to build their own social media forums, and exposing, ridiculing, embarrassing and challenging the dominance of the Intolerant Left.
In a war the left will lose.
Yeah, I often wished FR had a ignore button like a certain chatroom has that I frequent. You should see my list. LOL
WELL... The COURTROOM is a public venue.
People should now be allowed to PROTEST in this judge’s COURTROOM without the worry of being jailed or fined for contempt of court.
“Cyberspace needs its own set of property rules that uniquely address all the special situations that exist in cyberspace and do not exist in the real world. Trying to adapt brick and mortar rules is impossible unless they are applied unfairly. This is what is happening here.”
Yup. Cyberspace is informational territory. You could even carve out a virtual nation. New rules coming like it or not.
>>You could even carve out a virtual nation. New rules coming like it or not.
Agreed!
I laugh right back at your laughing. But I’m laughing much harder, because that’s a great way of disrespecting another person’s thoughts.
Tommy Robinson has no conservative label tattooed on him. He was banned on Twitter, now arrested for livestreaming. The lines between cyberspace and the town square are exceptionally blurred.
No - the judge specifically said that Trump couldn’t block users on his account because it denied the followers the right to speak to him.
The judge based this on Trumps use of Twitter to make official statements of policy declaring it a public forum.
This means that Twitter can’t ban people otherwise they deny the people the right to talk to the President.
But like a good lib you want It only to apply to Republicans while Democrats are free to block whenever they want
Yup. I have about ten people (2-3 who troll me) here I’d like to block. Life on FR would be much more sane.
Well than don’t wear no clothing items that identifies your political position. Besides it’s no ones business. And if they don’t like it I would refuse to go there, and shop there.
I did, to no avail. Articles from the Federalist are not banned btw, as I have posted some before.
“As Twitter has now been officially declared a public forum it can no longer ban people based on their political speech as it denies those being banned from interacting with government officials.”
Read again.
You read - the court found Trumps chat (and ergo any government officials’ tweet chats) as a public forum.
That, the judge ruled, is the reasoning why Trump can’t block followers.
ERGO - Twitter can’t ban twitter users for political speech in general because they’re denying them access to the President.
"Fair" is in the eye of the beholder. I agree that there may be incredible inefficiencies in applying millenia-old rules of property to the decades-old internet. Yes, we currently lack a sizable competitor to FB or Twitter and until such a time, they are the market leaders. I personally don't like all the things people give up when they sign the Apple "Privacy" policy.
However, nobody is FORCING ANYONE to use FB or Twitter or Apple. And I suspect over time, just like in your Wal-Mart example where customers would likely flee to competitors, a viable competitor to FB and Twitter WILL emerge. Indeed, remember Netscape and Altavista and the Betamax?
The key to this process is to avoid government meddling. The private sector is best at sorting out these things..it may not be fast enough for many of us, but it's preferable to Leviathan. Throwing away the irreducible primary of "it's mine and I can do what I want with it" because of the Internet is something I'm not willing to embrace, nor do I suspect are you. Where we seemingly disagree is the threat potential while we wait, and the extent to which government can move things along. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but it's worked for me (and scores of others) over thousands of years. Thanks for listening.
Well, Twitter accounts don't cost anything but you and I pay Dan Scovino to administer the account and he often posts thing there that were obviously not written by DJT.
Trump is free to have a purely private account where he can block anyone he wants, but he can't use it for official US business.
I’ll concede your point on paying for the account, as I am not a Twitter user.
WRT the use of his own account, I would like to know why he can’t use it to make announcements to the public. This all revolves around a central question: does a person who is elected to be President of the United States lose their right to free speech or freedom of association? I would say that the answer MUST be “no.” Again, this is Trump’s own personal account, which was set up years before he declared his candidacy, won the election, or was inaugurated. He should have as much right as you, I or any other person to decide whether or not to ban particular people from commenting on his Twitter feed. He simply cannot lose his rights because he was elected to serve the people. None of these people are prohibited from commenting elsewhere (like, for example, their OWN Twitter accounts), and most certainly not by government edict. This is not censorship in any form whatsoever. This court decision was 100% wrong, and I am confident that if it is appealed (and it should be), it will be overturned. As I alluded to in my first post, this is his personal property, and having control of it taken away from him is likely and unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment.
No, the censorship standards must focus on foul language, not on viewpoint.
There’s nothing stopping Trump from having a personal account where he can say what he wants and block whomever he wants.
The problem is his @realDonaldTrump account became more than his personal account when his tweets became official government statements and he started to use taxpayer funded employees to maintain the account and tweet on his behalf.
>>Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but it’s worked for me (and scores of others) over thousands of years.
I am not disputing thousands of years of physical property rights. I am talking about something that is uniquely 21st century at this point in human history. “Fair” is not just in the eye of the beholder. “Fair use” is a real thing in law. the lines over property blur as I put my intellectual property up on someone else’s intellectual property and both are hosted on someone else’s physical property which operates on someone else’s intellectual property. By the property rights of the past, the owner of the server now owns it all.
But, IP rights have protected the OS owner’s rights. It protects the service owner’s rights. But it has not evolved enough to protect the individual IP rights of the poster. Using the old property rights of physical property, the rights of the individual in cyberspace are nil. Is that freedom to you? Especially now that it is finally possible to have a conversation with literally anyone anywhere and to make your own voice heard! You would nail that capability to the old concepts of rights that determines who owns the strip of ground where a fence sits??
Yes, everyone can opt out of cyberspace.
But, no they can’t. It is a part of our lives now. People in third world countries who can’t figure out how to drill a water well get cell phones and join the global hive mind. You cheapen your argument by simply saying that, “If you don’t like your IP being owned by the guy who has the keys to the server, then you should unplug your life from the world around you.”
If this Trump twitter account is his personal account, i.e., paid by him, no court has jurisdiction to not allow him to do this. Was this judge an Clinton or Obama appointee?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.