Donald Trump can’t block people on Twitter because of First Amendment, judge rules

The Department of Justice says it disagrees with the decision and is contemplating its next move

The masthead of U.S. President Donald Trump's @realDonaldTrump Twitter account in July (Handout via REUTERS )

President Donald Trump cannot block critics on Twitter as doing so violates their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling from Judge Naomi Buchwald said that discussions arising from Mr Trump's tweets should be considered a public forum, as the messages are “governmental in nature". Judge Buchwald rejected an argument from the Department of Justice that Mr Trump's own rights under the First Amendment allowed him to block people with whom he did not want to interact with.

Blocking users “as a result of the political views they have expressed is impermissible under the First Amendment,” Judge Buchwald wrote in the order, adding the president cannot use Twitter in a way “that infringes on the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him”.

A handful of Twitter users had sued after the president blocked them in response to critical tweets. The resulting case turned on the questions posed by Mr Trump’s unprecedented use of Twitter to announce policies, elevate allies and lambaste foes

As Judge Buchwald wrote, the legal challenge entails “the First Amendment’s application to the distinctly twenty-first century medium of Twitter”.

However, the judge stopped short of directly ordering Mr Trump - or those who work for him - to unblock users, saying it was not necessary to enter a “legal thicket” involving the power court can hold over the president. The lawsuit had also named Mr Trump's social media director, Dan Scavino, as a defendant.

“Because no government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the president and Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional,” she wrote.

The White House has defended Mr Trump’s continued of his personal Twitter account - despite inflammatory statements that have generated repeated controversies - by saying it is a conduit that allows him to speak directly to the American people. The decision noted that his tweets often drawn thousands fo responses.

The users whom Mr Trump blocked cannot, as a result, view or directly reply to tweets that amount to public pronouncements by the president.

Given that public context, Judge Buchwald wrote that freezing out users who dissent from the president’s viewpoint violates their rights by “restricting a real, albeit narrow, slice of speech”.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which represented the blocked plaintiffs, lauded the decision.

“We’re pleased with the court’s decision, which reflects a careful application of core First Amendment principles to government censorship on a new communications platform,” the institute’s executive director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement. “The president’s practice of blocking critics on Twitter is pernicious and unconstitutional, and we hope this ruling will bring it to an end”.

The Department of Justice said in a statement that it disagreed with the decision and was contemplating its next move.

The president's prolific Twitter usage has already posed a series of thorny free speech questions.

After Mr Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear war and shared prejudiced messages from a far-right British party, Twitter fielded questions about whether the president was violating policies prohibiting abuse and incitement to violence.

In response, Twitter has said that messages from world leaders like Mr Trump are inherently of public interest and argued that blocking those users or censoring certain messages would “not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions”.