Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, addressing a novel issue about how the Constitution applies to social media platforms and public officials, found that the president’s Twitter feed is a public forum. As a result, she ruled that when Mr. Trump or an aide blocked seven plaintiffs from viewing and replying to his posts, he violated the First Amendment.Given the ongoing insanity, you really should take a minute and read the link above. It won't take but a minute and will prove helpful when people you know tell you that of course Dorsey has every right to cut off and deny the President of the Free World access to the system because First Amendment. There is more insanity at The Register.
As such, he is breaking the First Amendment on free speech by preventing people from being able to see his posts, responses to his posts, or contact him over the service - if they are logged in to Twitter. The court decided that the president's own First Amendment rights did not override the plaintiffs.On the other hand the billionaire owner of Twitter is talking about banishing the President of the United States from the communication system if anything he writes is hurtful to some moron or left wing bigot. But I repeat myself.
Bear with me here. We start, again, with the New York Times.
If Twitter wanted to, it would be well within its rights to suspend Donald J. Trump’s account. After the president-elect used Twitter last week to criticize Chuck Jones, an Indiana union leader who represents workers at the Carrier company, Mr. Jones reported receiving a series of threatening phone calls from Mr. Trump’s supporters. Similarly, last year, Mr. Trump used Twitter to attack a college student who asked him a critical question at a rally; The Washington Post reported that the woman has been barraged by obscene and deranged threats ever since.
As a corporation, Twitter is under no First Amendment obligation to let Mr. Trump use the service. It gets to make its own set of speech rules within its own walls, and among those rules is a prohibition on using the service to incite harassment. Earlier this year, the company suspended several Trump supporters who appeared to run afoul of those rules. Twitter has said that its policies apply to every user.I imagine Dorsey's eyes bugged out of his head when he read those words because with those two paragraphs the priceless New York Times just told the world that the U.S. Government must now step in and regulate Twitter and probably all other social media and start placing them under the lash of the Federal Communications Communication who will then order them to began acting as a "common carrier." Read the link it's brief and it is what will roil the U.S. for the next 5-10 years.
You thought net neutrality was a thing, wait until the government steps in and tells the various social media scabs that they are not permitted to throttle the exchange of information across their servers unless it something like child porn which is forbidden by law. All those who bleated about the need for net neutrality never thought it would apply to the flow of informational content they disdain. They thought they could continue to gobble up bandwidth and the ISPs were compelled to provide more and more and more. It's like Rent Control. They almost got what they wanted.
I'm sure with friends like the New York Times, Dorsey is suffering from a severe case of heart burn and urge to kill. His allies are far far more dangerous than the many of us who just want one set of rules for all. Chumps.
Read that first cited paragraph again. If the law thinks it can compel the President to refrain from not sharing his thoughts because of the First Amendment, what novel approach will Dorsey argue that he is not banning 52 million twitter followers from receiving those vital Presidential thoughts because it's his public duty to limit the spread of ideas in the "public forum" when they are what the rabid people hate?
I love it!
4 comments:
It has always been my opinion that all human caused problems can be resolved by the use of a suitable amount of high explosive placed in an appropriate manner and detonated at the appropriate time.
But for Dorsey's twit problem, I just don't have a clue. I think he loses no matter what.
Jefferson warned us about the judiciary, but today as in those days, people refused to listen. We now have neither, law, justice, nor commonsense.
We do have judicial monsters.
We need a way for both Federal government and states to over rule and remove such monsters. I would suggest any state may over rule a judge or court with a 60% vote, the same for the Federal government.
Further a judge who has been reversed three times by a superior court and upheld by the senate should be removed from the bench by a majority vote.
I was just reading that millenials are closing down their accounts in social media at an alarming rate. Good for them.
I think all judges and justices can be impeached either by the state legislators or by congress in the case of the Supreme Court. The mechanisms are in the constitution. Look at West Virginia, they just last week impeached the entire state supreme court. However, as we watch the current nonsense in the senate play out over Kavanagh it seems that political theatre will always outweigh the needs of the state and the needs of the people.
Not sure what we can do about that.
Post a Comment