Comment by bumholio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumholio | Hacker News Reader

> Trump could “mute” users, meaning he would not see their tweets while they could still respond to his, she said, without violating their free speech rights.

Herein lies the problem: Trump does not want to block his critics from expressing their thoughts - he can't do that anyway. Nor can he truly block them from seeing his tweets. He wants their replies not to be part of the conversation started by his tweets. They can still comment, on their own pages, in their own articles, but their comments will not have similar visibility to the people that follow Donald Trump and related conversations.

And I think the court overreached to call it a violation of the rights to free speech. Because what the commenters really want is visibility, they want to piggy back on the large audience Trump's tweets have and exploit the way Twitter's algorithm highlights such replies, especially if they are 'considered important' though their own retweets, likes etc.

For example, I want to produce an one hour rant about how Donald Trump is a cretin that damages the US and the world, and have it uploaded on the White House website - an official communication tool of the US government - so that it has proper visibility. But the White House can rightfully deny that request without violating my freedom of speech. Twitter is a multi-user version of a similar software, which unlike whitehouse.gov is configured by default to allow such posts on other's users pages.

Sure, but that's exactly the problem. The President having direct control over the visibility of somoene's speech. It's one thing if someone simply isn't popular, and therefore their speech isn't widely seen. It's another for the President to specifically suppress your speech.

It really does constitute a first amendment violation, because it is an active decision to suppress the specific speech of specific individuals.

How does one account muting another suppress their speech? Everyone else still sees the tweet.

Apparently, muting is fine. Blocking prevents comments from showing up in replies. It's a form of moderation.

I wonder if the decision comes down to that some people have the ability to be a part of the conversation on Twitter, but not the people that Trump has blocked, and therefore that's considered unequal treatment.

To follow your analogy, nobody can post their podcast on the White House's website. If Donald Trump somehow had replies completely turned off for his Twitter, I don't think a case could be made that first amendment rights were being infringed.

Well, that discrimination exists on the current White House site. I just went there and on the front page I found this article, that quotes some people friendly to Trump's policies, many of them (ironically) sourced from tweets:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/wtas-support...

So why should these people be cited, but not others critical to the administration? Who gets to make that decision, and why can't they make a similar decision on Twitter itself?

The white house's website, (and more particularly, a section dedicated to publishing official statements) is not a public forum.

The comment section of tweets is. And how government entities engage in public forums is regulated by the constitution and case law. Excluding people for previous expressions of their first amendment rights violates the first amendment in two rights, as it punishes the citizen for how they exercised their 1st amendment rights, in a way that further limits their 1st amendment rights.

This is akin to town halls ran by the government in private buildings. The building owner can surely exclude you because they don't like what you say, but the government can not.

So if mr. Trump declares his Twitter account "not a public forum, but a section dedicated to publishing official supportive replies, that by default publishes all replies and selectively deletes those who aren't supportive", will that make things ok?

It's not like a town hall because there is no official charter for what the realDonalTrump Twitter is. It seems some people want to enforce their view that it's a public forum, while clearly violating mr. Trump's own 1st amendment rights by forcing him to promote on his Twitter page content that is damaging to him.

The "on his Twitter page" distinction is critical, because you can still use the wider Twitter public forum as before, and you can engage in the wider conversation, you just don't have the same visibility to his followers. You were evicted form a personal performance of the President juggling pink dildos.

The comments section below each of his tweets does act as a sort of town hall. The point of this is that anyone should be able to reply to his tweets and participate in the public discourse that happens there.

He's the one that brought this on himself. His ego wanted the follower count on his personal account, and the White House itself has decreed that his personal account can be considered "official communications".

Let's not make this out to be people forcing him to act a certain way. He could easily have avoided this.

I'd say the difference is that Whitehouse.com is granting it on an individual basis, as a whitelist. On Twitter, Trump is himself picking and choosing who to blacklist. It's ok to only allow some people to join the conversation, it's not ok to selectively say "no, you CANT join" due to personal disagreements.

Juvenile comparison, but it's like how school teachers won't usually let kids give out birthday invites in class unless they give one to everybody, because otherwise you get just the unpopular kids being selectively disinvited. Yet those kids are allowed to give those invites outside the classroom/public forum

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