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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Aborting Down Syndrome Babies Is An Absolute Moral Imperative

Image
Conservatives have played it dumb throughout history mainly because they have no faith that social order will actually change. Having accepted defeat, and decided to work with a broken system, they then contort their beliefs to rationalize the decay, and focus on symbolic issues in order to unify themselves since they are basically dispirited and confused. One symbolic issue that plagues conservatism is abortion. At its core, we dislike abortion from a sanctity of life argument: terminating a unique new life simply for sexual convenience is, after all, a sign of extreme moral decline and an ugliness that spreads a utilitarian view of life to other areas. However, the nature of symbolic issues is that they become manipulative, since reality is forgotten in favor of symbolism. Over at The Federalist , David Marcus, writes in disapproval of aborting Down's Syndrome babies : No decent parent rejects a child’s love because the child is imperfect. Nobody casts aside an eight-yea...
Read more

An Interesting Argument For Monarchism

Image
From the USmonarchy group on Reddit , a series of arguments: I recognize a real and tangible need for our country to re-evaluate our principles, values, and what we expect from our government; most people can agree that some manner of fundamental change would be in our best interest. What we seldom agree on, however, is what changes should be made... So why monarchism? Why in the world would America need a king ? Reason I: Integrity. From the lowest representative up to the head of the executive branch, almost all our government officials appear to be bought and paid for, beholden to the special interest groups and lobbyists that fund their election campaigns. That means that the power to regulate, one that is supposed to be invested in the populace, actually resides in the pockets of the wealthy and well-connected. The reality is, what ails our political system cannot simply be remedied by voting; only power in the right hands can do that. A monarch h...
Read more

On Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock And Comfortable Media Narratives

Image
We know a lot about Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed fifty-eight people at a Las Vegas concert with bump stocks and semiautomatic rifles, but the pattern makes so little sense that we know nothing at all of the man himself. In fact, it seems as if he went out of his way to obfuscate his own life before going on what he surely knew was a suicide mission. And now, the media narrative emerges in its final form : A jailed man who gave a statement to authorities in November said he encountered a man he believed was Stephen Paddock and who told him that Federal Emergency Management Agency “camps” setup after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin' down doors and...confiscating guns.” “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man said Paddock told him less than a month before the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” These statemen...
Read more