First Amendment Advocates Charge Trump Can't Block Critics On Twitter.
President Trump is facing a lawsuit for blocking people from his Twitter account.
This week some First Amendment advocates joined the suit — and they are making a novel argument about the right to communicate with the president in the digital age.
One of the plaintiffs in the suit is Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at University of Maryland. Just like President Trump, Cohen likes to tweet. He saw an opportunity to express himself to the president by tweeting to the account @realDonaldTrump.
"I noticed right away that his Twitter feed was a place that people congregated and exchanged views," he says. "So that was the place to go to express myself."
Cohen has a verified account on Twitter — that's when you have a following and they confirm you are who you say you are. That means his tweets got to the top of the president's feed. Cohen set up an alert so that he could know when President Trump tweeted.
"If I replied right away, I could get lucky and have a lot of people read my tweets," he says.
But then, one day the president blocked him. Cohen was surprised. He says he wasn't trolling the president.
"I was basically civil," he says. "I didn't use a lot of profanity. I didn't harass people individually. I mostly made graphical memes with slogans on them like 'corrupt,' 'incompetent,' and 'authoritarian.'"
Cohen says once he was blocked, his tweets about the president reached fewer people. So he believes the blocking is censoring his ability to criticize the government.
Entire article at:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/11/07/562619874/first-amendment-advocates-charge-trump-cant-block-critics-on-twitter?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202808