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Fri, 12 Jul 2019

Following Trump Ruling Against Twitter Blockade, AOC Sued For Her Blocks On Twitter
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So we just wrote about the 2nd Circuit Appeals court affirming a victory for the Knight 1st Amendment Center against Donald Trump, making it clear that he cannot block followers on social media. As we noted, the case is very fact specific, and people shouldn't read too much into it. But, in general, it does find that if someone is a public official, using social media for official government purposes, and creating an open public forum out of that, they cannot block followers based on the views of those followers -- as that is the state engaging in impermissible viewpoint discrimination.Some Trump supporters then spun that around on the other side of the aisle, picking out the fact that freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has blocked people on Twitter as well. Indeed, as Scott Greenfield points out, in the wake of the 2nd Circuit ruling, former NY State Assemblyman Dov Hikind has already sued Ocasio-Cortez, pointing out that she has him blocked on Twitter.And, again, the whole point we tried to make with our post about the Trump ruling is that the rules are very fact specific -- but based on what's known so far, it looks like Hikind is absolutely correct. AOC famously uses her Twitter feed for official government business all the time. And if she's blocked Hikind for the way he expresses his views, it seems likely that she, too, is on the wrong side of the Constitution. From the lawsuit, it appears Hikind is very much blocked by AOC:

I've seen some people trying to distinguish the two cases -- but mostly that seems based on their political views, and whether they tend to support Trump or AOC. And that's a problem. There may be distinguishing factors that come out later, but from what's laid out in the lawsuit as presented, it seems like Hikind's case is pretty much identical to the Knight case, and AOC shouldn't be allowed to block people from this particular account. One possible distinction would be if AOC can prove that the decisions to block were not based on content (a violation of the 1st Amendment), but on actions, such as harassment -- however, it would be very, very difficult to make that case in a credible way that doesn't also create all sorts of knock-on consequences for speech.I've seen some raise issues about how she should be able to make use of the tools provided on the platform to block trolls and harassers, but, again, that applies equally to Trump. And going back to basics, if the government official is creating an open forum, they cannot block people based on their expression. That's sort of fundamental to the 1st Amendment. And thus, if you agree that Trump can't block users, it seems that should apply equally to AOC, no matter if you support one of them, neither of them or even (amazingly) both of them.

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