US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, a Clinton appointee, ruled that when Trump blocks Twitter trolls from his personal @realDonaldTrump account, he violates the First Amendment.
Trump is accused of unconstitutionally blocking unfavorable users, dubbed Twitter trolls, from his personal @realDonaldTrump account. The Twitter trolls sued Trump, arguing that when they were blocked, they could not participate in discussions with others in the comments sections on Trump’s tweets, and were therefore deprived of their First Amendment rights.
The fact that @realDonaldTrump is a personal account did not prevent Buchwald from opining that the sporadic use of the account for government purposes converted the tweets into government speech and the account into a public forum.
The Donald does not often waste time waging battles he might not win, and the Twitter thing seemed minor to me. But what he did, was get a ruling which creates a precedent that a twitter account, despite it being on a private company’s server, and part of a private company’s business, is in fact a public space where First Amendment rights apply.
If the First Amendment applies, that would mean Twitter can now not interfere with Trump’s free speech, and others who use their account for economic purposes relating to political speech may also be part of a public forum that is beholden to First Amendment rules.
And if you have this ruling on Twitter, what about Facebook and Google? Are they, by virtue of their scale and monopoly, and an individual’s lack of alternatives, public spaces? If denying you service there denies you an audience, is it not an infringement on your right to be heard, and is your right to be heard not a vital element of your right to speak?
And what if it can be shown at some point that agents of the government, with partisan ideological agendas and a desire to affect electoral outcomes were issuing these parties orders regarding whose speech to interfere with?
The God Emperor may have just let that case be lost to gain a larger precedent, perhaps for the coming class action lawsuits Q has been implying were in the works to take control of the social media giants.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because this is now a raw battle for power, where anything goes
I think the issue revolves around public servant. So unless this decision can be extended to private citizens who were shadowbanned/blocked due to ideological reasons, it is limited to bureaucrats and politicians.
Another more nefarious tactic of big social is to create vague guidelines as to what constitutes ‘hate speech’, ‘incitement’ etc. These can be massaged to mean basically anything the gatekeepers want.
Here’s the pickle for Twitter, though — as long as they are allowing any politicians on, they are giving up their property rights regarding that politician. If twitter bans me because of something I reply to the leftist EPA director in 8 years, this precedent brings it back to them blocking MY access to a government official.
Wouldn’t just following a politician give you the ability to argue, like these people, that if they ban you, it is blocking you from being able to speak? Basically, it makes following President Trump a ban-shield, no matter what you do. Trump will have 4 Billion Twitter followers, all cranky Pedes shitposting at leftists daily, by the end of the day that gets out.
The moment I saw the judgement I lept immediately to “Well *that* was a stupid move by the left… thanks!”
They’ve just ripped the doors wide open against themselves as they’ve been hiding behind the ability to block people to maintain their bubble, including the mass auto-blockers. Every single Democrat and Cuckservative will no longer be able to curate what their readers see and we all know when it comes to flooding the channels with real talk the alt-right holds all the cards currently. From there the broader “what is this platform really?” discussion gets a big boost.
They shot themselves in the foot all because a handful of parasites who made their living scraping Trump’s twitter suddenly found their income harder to come by when they were blocked. Brilliant.
If the judge was in on the decision with Trump, I doubt there will be public confirmation. Which is too bad. Judicial politics is the worst.
Pull quotes from the Opinion itself (my emphasis):
All of this is in the context of Trump’s tweets being governmental communication, but that is a distinction without a difference — because when Twitter bans a user, as long as Trump or any other government official has a twitter account, that person is being blocked from being able to participate in this governmental forum. Sure, an auditorium can refuse to sell tickets to anyone they want — but not when it is a governmental town hall, certainly not based on their political views.
Twitter is going to be boxed into either dumping every single government official, or ending banning (and more importantly, shadowbanning.)
So, you can comment on a politicians twitter feed and the politician can’t legally remove the tweet or block you. And now…. Twitter has set itself up as it cannot remove a tweet without violating a users 1st Amendment protections.
It’s open season for a Tweet war.
In case you weren’t already aware, American Renaissance is suing Twitter for banning their accounts on the basis that Twitter is a “public forum” under California law and as such is subject to the First Amendment. (The video announcing their lawsuit: youtube.com/watch?v=CUg5TrWzjzY)
Yes I see the point. The flaw in the argument is in the underlying assumption that there is anything resembling a rule of law in the cabal-run Banana Empire and its farce of a justice system. There is not. “Law” is completely arbitrary: it’s whatever a blackrobed philosopher-king says it is at any particular moment on any particular subject (in short, whatever what the body-snatcher overlords want it to be in the case at hand).
Note the endless stream of rulings – applied nationwide – by lower level district court blackrobes over the enforcement of immigration laws. Trump has been able to to very little when you take these into account. Whole states are in open defiance of the nominal (written) law but blackrobes rule that payments from the feds must continue regardless. Your earlier points about the extent of body-snatcher control need to be factored in here. They own the entire legal system – from law schools to bar exams to state bars to judges, prosecutors and major law firms. They’ve had this area under their control for decades running. One would have come close to literally following the line from Henry VI (we’ll kill all the lawyers) to reset things.
I believe the last judge to be impeached and removed from the bench by congress – itself a wholly owned cabal plantation of ambulance-chasers – was Alcee Hastings, who was so utterly corrupt he was caught taking bribes in chamber. Guess what he became after being removed from the judiciary? A member of congress, of course! Folks like to talk about the “God-Emperor” but fail to understand that he’d literally have to be an emperor to shovel out the massive and total corruption of the swamp-system. Maybe that’s the “plan” and maybe that’s why it seems to taking far too long to be for real. Cleaning it up takes a lot of rooting out at all levels. Someone at Vox Day’s place offered the analogy of defusing a bomb. That’s probably an understatement.
I agree. On one hand they say Christians have to bake cakes for homosexuals and on the other you can’t ban obnoxious people from following you. The Judiciary rules all over the map with very little thought to the actual law or any sort of common sense.
I forgot to add here’s another article that popped up while following the links from here. I know this is old but I can’t believe there was not major coverage of this. I never heard of it. A Man is pardoned by Clinton, corrupt but he did pardon him, and a Judge rules he must stay in jail anyways until his net worth is quantified. This is crazy. Doesn’t the Constitution say Presidents can pardon anyone? And if they do then damn it they should be let go. Some may complain about “this” pardon, well fine but the power to pardon is very powerful and the President should have it. I can think of plenty of cases that we would want Trump to pardon people. Sheriff Joe was one I liked. What if the Judge kept him in jail anyways??? He’s the top elected official and sometimes he needs this. The Judge should have been impeached for treason.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20030125/News/605240222/SH/
The whole system is rotten.