[DAWN] A New York judge sought to avoid a testy tech-age free-speech showdown between Donald Trump...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
and people blocked from his Twitter account on Thursday, proposing the president just mute rather than block them.
In a unique case given rise by Trump’s relentless use of Twitter to communicate to the American public, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said she was not ready to decide whether people have a right to complain, protest and insult in the comments section of his Twitter feed.
| President Trump’s tweets are reported by numerous television and cable shows, newspapers, magazines, comedians, columnists and pundits, and of course websites, blogs, and tweets, almost all of which allow comments or letters to the editor. Those who have been blocked by him therefore have plenty of other venues where their disagreements can be seen, and they can even write letters or emails directly to the president to inform him of their opinion. If the court rules that President Trump is nonetheless forbidden to block them, it won’t be long before all public figures, including actors and Instapundit personalities like the Kardashians are likewise forbidden to block those who say mean things to them... though those other public figures will not be able to send the Secret Service to interview those who make threats. |
Trump’s tweets, which cover everything from public policy to what he sees on television and attacks on Democrats, are seen by millions of people and often draw tens of thousands of comments each.
The seven plaintiffs, though, are among "a few hundred" blocked by Trump, according to Ujala Sehgal, communications director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which also joined the suit.
Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, said he was summarily blocked in June 2017 after he reacted to a Trump tweet by replying with a photo of the president superimposed with the words "Corrupt Incompetent Authoritarian".
"At first I was kind of proud, like ’oh he cares about me,’" Cohen said.
"But then very quickly I realized that a lot fewer people were seeing my tweets and my political efficacy, my ability to speak to my fellow citizens, was impaired by that. And I think that’s not the way our government should act." Nicholas Pappas, a New York comedian who was blocked by Trump last year for his critical comments on immigration policy, told the court that the result was that comments on the president’s tweets were mostly positive. It’s important that critics’ opinions are also represented, he said.