Court Rules Trump Tweets Are First Amendment Protected, But That Does Not Mean That Yours Are

Tonight many keyboards are firing away at full speed about how a court's ruling that Donald Trump's Twitter messages are First Amendment protected means that Twitter will have to finally be an open and free speech zone. While this sounds like a nice idea, in fact the opposite is true.

The court found that Trump's tweets are special because they are a communication from government. This is what gives us First Amendment protections in our replies to them.

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums, and that blocking Twitter users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of Constitution.

Eugene Volokh, a University of California Los Angeles School of Law professor who specializes in First Amendment issues, said the decision’s effect would reach beyond Trump.

“It would end up applying to a wide range of government officials throughout the country,” he said.

Key point: this applies to communications from government. The point of the First Amendment is that the government cannot restrict your speech, not that it has to guarantee you free speech everywhere you go.

Twitter will remain as it has before, with the exception that a public official cannot use it to block replies from the other side, if this ruling stands (which it most likely will not, for the same reason that "free speech zones" still exist, which is that people are still capable of using other methods of expressing their replies).

Again we must face the difficult fact: private industry reflects its audience, and as long as have lots of crazed Leftists out there, much of private industry will censor us. The law will do nothing about it; there is very little, in fact, that law can fix. We will be discriminated against until we build our own networks and replace the people who would eliminate us.