Twitter Users threatened to sue Trump

Users threatened to sue Trump for blocking them on Twitter. Experts say it's a long shot.

Donald Trump is an avid user of Twitter, and that includes Twitter’s “block” feature. When Trump blocks another user, that user can no longer read Trump’s tweets or reply to them. Legal scholars at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute say that’s a constitutional problem.

It’s not an obvious one, though.

The Columbia trio is threatening to sue the government on behalf of two Twitter users who have been blocked in recent weeks after mocking the president on the platform.

“Blocking users from your Twitter account violates the First Amendment,” the lawyers write in a letter to Trump. “When the government makes a space available to the public at large for the purpose of expressive activity, it creates a public forum from which it may not constitutionally exclude individuals on the basis of viewpoint.”

Others doubt this argument would stand up in court. “I don't think it's very credible,” says Ken White, a First Amendment litigator who blogs at Popehat.com. “I don't know that Twitter blocking is the same in any meaningful way as preventing someone from speaking or kicking them out of a public forum.”

Getting blocked by Trump creates only a small burden, at most, on anyone’s ability to participate in Twitter conversations. And White argues that wrapping politicians’ use of social media up in red tape could ultimately backfire, discouraging them from participating in these more open and democratic communications media altogether.

Social media can be a “public forum”