Trump Sued For Blocking Twitter Users
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Jul 11, 2017
A trying day for the Trump administration has turned more bizarre, when shortly after Donald Trump Jr. released the chain of emails released ahead of his correspondence with the Russian lawyer who had promised to deliver anti-Clinton information with the implied blessing of the Russian government, a free-speech group sued President Donald Trump for blocking Twitter users from his @realDonaldTrump account, arguing the practice violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The lawsuit was brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York and joined by seven individual Twitter users, and claims that Trump blocked a number of accounts whose owners replied to his tweets with comments that criticized, mocked or disagreed with the president. The lawsuit, filed in Southern District of NY, claims that Trump’s blocking of the accounts amounted to an unconstitutional effort to suppress dissent, although we are confident that Twitter itself would have certain things to say about the purpose of the “block” function which it has been touting in recent months as a way to evade trolls.
“Everyone being able to see the president’s tweets feels vital to democracy,” Joseph Papp, one of the seven Twitter users involved in the suit, said in a statement. As Reuters adds, Papp, an author, said he had been a registered Republican for 10 years and did not join the suit for political reasons, but that he “felt a deep sense of unease” when he was blocked.
The suit names Spicer and Dan Scavino, the White House director of social media, as defendants in addition to Trump. It asks for the blocking to be deemed unconstitutional and seeks an injunction to require the president to unblock users. The complaint follows a letter from the Knight Institute to Trump last month warning it would sue if users were not unblocked.
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