President Trump’s practice of blocking Twitter users who are critical of him from seeing his posts on the social media platform violates the First Amendment, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday.
The ruling came in a case brought by seven Twitter users who had been blocked by the @realDonaldTrump account, which has 52.5 million followers, after they criticized the president.
The plaintiffs, who were joined in the suit by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, claimed that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed is an official government account and that blocking users from following it was a violation of their First Amendment rights.
In her ruling, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, wrote of the plaintiffs that “the speech in which they seek to engage is protected by the First Amendment” and that Mr. Trump and Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, “exert governmental control over certain aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account.”
“The viewpoint-based exclusion of the individual plaintiffs from that designated public forum is proscribed by the First Amendment and cannot be justified by the president’s personal First Amendment interests,” Judge Buchwald wrote.
