Should the President Be Allowed to Block You on Twitter?

• Author: Von Spakovsky, Hans
• Position: Debate

President Trump has 54 million followers on Twitter. He uses the social media platform to announce policies, attack political adversaries, and promote his administration's accomplishments.

He has also blocked some of his critics from his Twitter account. The exact number of people blocked by Trump is unknown, but free speech groups say it's at least in the hundreds.

Last year, seven Twitter users who said they'd been unfairly blocked from following Trump's account after they criticized the president filed a lawsuit saying their First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. In May, a federal judge agreed, ruling that Trump's habit of blocking his critics from what is effectively a digital public forum is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling, so the legal battle will continue.

Here, two experts--one from a conservative think tank, the other from a group that defends First Amendment freedoms--debate whether the president should be allowed to block his critics.

YES

The president should be able to block you on Twitter, just like anyone else with a Twitter account. The federal judge who held that the president violated the First Amendment by blocking certain followers on his account was wrong.

The First Amendment, which says that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," prevents censorship of Americans by the government. But Twitter isn't the government; it's a private social media company, so First Amendment protections don't apply in the same way.

Some people have argued that Twitter is, in effect, a "public forum" since it's a medium by which so many people disseminate and receive news and information. That reasoning doesn't hold water: To be considered "public," the forum has to be owned or controlled by the government, like a public park or a street corner.

As a private company, Twitter, not the government, controls the accounts of its 300 million users, including

Donald Trump. As its terms of service outline, Twitter "may suspend or terminate your account ... at any time for any or no reason." So even though the president can block individuals from his own account, Twitter has the ultimate control of @realDonaldTrump.

But don't American citizens have the right to criticize their president? Of course. Anyone blocked by President Trump may say whatever they choose about him on their own Twitter accounts, or anywhere else on social media for that matter, providing they don't violate the rules that those media have put in place for their users.

The First Amendment, however, doesn't require Trump or anyone else to "listen" to criticism, and that's what the Twitter blocking is really about. Trump has the right to decide who will...