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$533M is the Department of Homeland Security’s annual spending on software licenses
 Trump can’t block Twitter critics, judge rules
A federal judge ruled on May 23 that President Donald Trump cannot block critics from viewing and interacting with his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account, although he and his social media assistants are free to mute accounts they don’t care to see.
In a First Amendment case that could have far-reaching implications for how public officials use Twitter and other social media platforms, U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald issued a 75-page ruling that boiled down to this: If you are a public official tweeting on an official account, there are limits to what you can do to avoid interacting with individuals whose views you don’t like.
The case was filed last year by the Knight First Amendment Institute
at Columbia University and several individuals who have been blocked from viewing the @realDonaldTrump account.
Buchwald agreed with the plaintiffs’ arguments that Trump’s Twitter feed met the standards for a “public forum,” as established by the Supreme Court, and access to it could therefore not be abridged on the basis of an individual’s opinion. To do so, Buchwald wrote, “constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.”
There’s no order to Trump or Social Media Director Dan Scavino, who is also named in the case, to unblock users. “A declaratory judgment should be sufficient, as no government official — including the president — is above the law, and all government officials
are presumed to follow the law as it has been declared,” Buchwald wrote. The judge discounted arguments that Trump had a First Amendment right to control his Twitter feed because the account was set up privately and used prolifically for years before he won the 2016 presidential
election.
Buchwald drew a distinction
between Twitter’s blocking and muting functions.
“Muting equally vindicates the president’s right to ignore certain speakers and to selectively amplify the voices of certain others but — unlike blocking — does so without restricting the right of the ignored to speak,” Buchwald wrote.
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