President Donald Trump cannot block users on his Twitter feed, a federal judge in New York City ruled Wednesday.
Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said in her ruling that Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by preventing certain Americans from viewing his tweets. The social media platform, she said, is a “designated public forum” from which Trump cannot exclude individual plaintiffs.
Buchwald’s ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed last July by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, as well as seven other plaintiffs who said they had been blocked on Twitter by Trump.
Trump’s blocks on the social media platform prevented the plaintiffs from viewing or responding to the president’s tweets when logged into their own Twitter accounts.
“This case requires us to consider whether a public official may, consistent with the First Amendment, ‘block’ a person from his Twitter account in response to the political views that person has expressed, and whether the analysis differs because that public official is the President of the United States,” the judge said in her opinion.
“The answer to both questions is no.”
Read the judge’s full ruling on Trump’s Twitter blocking here
The president is a regular Twitter user and routinely makes news, often several times in a single day, with his posts.
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