15 July, 2017
Several Twitter users are suing U.S. President Donald Trump after he blocked them from accessing his social media page.
The plaintiffs are seeking declaration that the blocking was unconstitutional in addition to an injunction requiring the president to unblock the users from Twitter. Crucially however, the new lawsuit focuses not on his tweets but something altogether more intriguing; blocking his Twitter critics. Donald Trump has been party to over 4,000 lawsuits in the last 30 years, according to some U.S. media sources.
The Manhattan federal court lawsuit from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University cited seven individuals rejected by Trump or his aides after criticizing the president. The lawsuit doesn't just name Trump however.
The blocked users describe Mr. Trump's frequent use of Twitter feed as "a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public". Besides Trump, the lawsuit also named as defendants White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Dan Scavino, White House director of social media. "Defendants have made the account accessible to all, taking advantage of Twitter's interactive platform to directly engage the President's 33 million followers".
The Knight Institute chose to sue Trump almost a month after it sent a letter to the new Republican president, asking him to unblock the users it represented. "It also imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to petition the government for redress of grievances".
Federal agencies and courts treat Trump's tweets as official statements, and The National Archives and Records Administration has advised the White House that the tweets must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, the lawsuit said.
"It's fair to say that this is a new frontier", Jaffer said.
Mr. Trump announced his nomination of Christopher A. Wray as F.B.I. director on Twitter, and the White House sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee pointing to Mr. Trump's denial on Twitter that he had taped his conversations with the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, as an answer to the panel's questions about that matter.
