Supreme Court Throws Out Decision Saying Trump Can't Block His Twitter Critics

The Supreme Court has finally resolved a major First Amendment case, nullifying a Second Circuit decision from 2019 that said Trump could not block his critics from his Twitter feed. Although Twitter is a private company, lower courts had ruled that Trump’s Twitter feed, @realDonaldTrump, constituted a public forum and the government could not deny access to it based on political speech. As Trump has left office and been summarily removed from Twitter after encouraging violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the Court held that the ruling was moot. Public officials aren't insulated from constituents' opinions The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University first sued Trump in 2017 on behalf of seven clients who Trump had blocked on Twitter. In 2018, a federal court in Manhattan found that the president and his aides exerted “government control” over the @realDonaldTrump account and had violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights. That decision was affirmed by the appellate court in 2019. “This case was about a very simple principle that is foundational to our democracy: Public officials can’t bar people from public forums simply because they disagree with them,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight Institute, in a statement. “This simple principle helps ensure that people aren’t excluded from the democratic process on the basis of their political views, that public officials aren’t insulated from the opinions of their constituents and that expressive forums that are important to our democracy aren’t transformed into echo chambers.” Jaffer added that he would have preferred the Supreme Court to leave the appellate court’s decision on the books, but is “gratified” that other courts have taken similar stances in recent cases. For example, the Fourth Circuit affirmed in 2019 that a local official in Virginia’s Loudoun County could not block her critics from her public Facebook profile. The former president’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. The 'unrestricted authority' of private companies Justice Clarence Thomas authored a concurring opinion on the case, offering mixed views on the case—and, more broadly, the power of social media companies in general. “Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s account resemble a constitutionally-protected public forum,” Thomas said. “But it seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it.” Thomas, the only justice to author an opinion, also expressed concern about the concentration of corporate power in the social media space. “Similar to utilities, today’s dominant digital platforms derive much of their value from network size,” he wrote. “The Internet, of course, is a network. But these digital platforms are networks within that network.” While the Knight case is about social media users’ First Amendment right to access government information free of viewpoint discrimination, Thomas’ opinion wades into a separate debate over whether private companies should have First Amendment rights to moderate their own platform—a debate reignited by Twitter and other platforms’ decisions to ban or suspend Trump for inciting violence amid the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “The Second Circuit feared that then-President Trump cut off speech by using the features that Twitter made available to him,” Thomas wrote. “But if the aim is to ensure that speech is not smothered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves.” In the footnotes of Thomas' opinion, the justice also suggested that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which offers some liability protections for internet companies that host user-generated content, could somehow violate the First Amendment. Mike Masnick, who edits the tech criticism site Techdirt, called this notion "completely off the wall bonkers." While Twitter is just one of many social media companies—and far from the largest—Thomas maintained that “the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms,” and concluded by lamenting that this decision did not offer the opportunity to weigh on issues of the private-sector control of speech. Antitrust Suit Takes New Aim at Google’s Cookieless Future