Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacifika | Hacker News Reader

Don’t understand this. Blocking a person does not prevent the followers of said person to see the conversation , thus it’s not a public forum?

View on HN

I agree that it's kind of a questionable decision but my understanding of it is, people can normally post public replies to tweets- but if the user blocks you, you can't post your public reply. OK (and desirable) for most people, not ok for the government to do.

There's not necessarily a perfect offline equivalent but it would sort of be like if the president tried to forbid a newspaper from running an editorial next to the text of a presidential speech- obviously unconstitutional. (not a perfect comparison because twitter users who are blocked can and do get around it by screenshotting or just linking to the tweet even though they can't reply to it)

I think the more interesting part of this is the ruling that the president's "personal" twitter account is an official government instrument.

>I think the more interesting part of this is the ruling that the president's "personal" twitter account is an official government instrument.

Didn't the administration state that Trump's tweets are official statements a while back? That might be a big reason why.

Edit: Yup, they did.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...

Ah, that changes things significantly.

While I'm still concerned about the potential application of this case onto others, the ruling is far more reasonable imo.

The ruling basically seems to come down to:

* If you are a government official, and

* If you have an account on a social-media network, and

* If you use that account to make official statements in your official capacity as a government official, then

* You must follow the rules government officials are subject to with respect to channels for official communications in their official capacities.

Among those rules are: you have to let the general public see what you're saying, and give them the opportunity to reply and comment, and cannot prevent them from seeing, replying or commenting simply because you don't like their opinions.

This should be completely unsurprising, but apparently a lot of people on HN are surprised at this.

(another fun and as-yet-undecided-by-a-court question is whether it's legal for him to delete tweets, since there are also record-keeping laws which typically require official communications to be preserved, and apparently HN is surprised at that too, judging from some of the other subthreads here)

I've noticed there are a lot of rude replies under most of Trumps tweets. I'd think it would be normal to block that kind of thing but I guess it's an odd situation - Twitter wasn't really designed for the president of the US.

For example - just the most recent https://twitter.com/ronrobiins/status/999283009957318656 - presidential ain't what it used to be.

> rude replies under most of Trumps tweets

He tweets many rude things, so I don't think they can cite any standard of behavior.

he can still mute people if his feelings get hurt

also this is not the first president to whom people have said rude things. If the definition of "presidential" has changed it's not because of people calling Trump a "parasite".

To be fair, no president was this rude. at least, not in public.

LBJ was a well known asshole. Did you actually think about your statement before you wrote it, or just assume that it would be true?

Yay personal attacks! There is a difference between being an asshole and being an asshole on tv/radio/twitter. The only way LBJ was same as Trump would be, if LBJ went on TV everyday and yelled profanity and called people names. Because that is what Trump does when he rage-tweets every morning.

LBJ was a well known asshole on every medium that was available to him.

Does Trump use a lot of profanity? I've never really noticed. What I notice is that he makes fun of his opponents a lot, but I don't really see how that is considered rude, when his opponents are doing the same thing back to him.

Go look at replies to any tweet from President Obama. I think you'd be hard pressed to say that there are not many equally as rude responses.

> I agree that it's kind of a questionable decision

I don't see what is questionable about it. Seems pretty straightforward, actually. He is an elected official who is held accountable by the public. He is widely known to make official policy statements using twitter. He can't just block citizens from reading his policy statements. That isn't how US democracy works.

> I think the more interesting part of this is the ruling that the president's "personal" twitter account is an official government instrument.

Well, considering how his "personal" twitter account is being used to make official policy statements... seems that it is no longer "personal" anymore, eh? He kinda brought that on himself, eh?

If all he was using Twitter for was posting pictures of his house-cats or something and not using it to conducting official government business, then you might have something to question.

> He can't just block citizens from reading his policy statements. That isn't how US democracy works.

if that was the crux of the issue, the ruling would be "stop making policy statements on twitter." The vast majority of US citizens don't use twitter and a sizable portion don't even have access to a twitter-capable device.

> if that was the crux of the issue, the ruling would be "stop making policy statements on twitter."

i don't think that sort of thing is within the purview of the court.

> The vast majority of US citizens don't use twitter and a sizable portion don't even have access to a twitter-capable device.

afaik there isn't a way to make statements in a manner that will reach all citizens.

> afaik there isn't a way to make statements in a manner that will reach all citizens.

I don't think Clinton and all the presidents before him had trouble making statements without the use of Twitter.

sure, and they didn't reach everyone either.

Most of which didn't have such a tool available to them. They did tend to use whatever technology they had available (radio, newspapers, television, trains, telegrams....). And they haven't all gone smoothly either, nor did they reach all eligible voters.

> The vast majority of US citizens don't use twitter and a sizable portion don't even have access to a twitter-capable device.

If you don't like that, consider taking that up with the Trump Administration. If his administration wants to use a medium that most people don't/won't/can't access, that kinda reflects on Trump. If you are down with that, cool. But the responsibility lies 100% with him.

This ruling says that if he insists on using twitter to make his policy statements, than he can't block people.

I dunno what more to say. Again. This seems like pretty straightforward stuff to me.

PS: I'm positive that somewhere down in the bowels of some federal government agency, somebody, somewhere, is trying to solve your concern. Probably by snapshotting his tweets and recording them in a more durable, accessable medium. (or god forbid printing them / saving them to PDF, etc). I also promise you tens of thousands of private citizens and journalists are doing the same thing.

"if that was the crux of the issue, the ruling would be "stop making policy statements on twitter." The vast majority of US citizens don't use twitter and a sizable portion don't even have access to a twitter-capable device."

But everyone knows that simply isn't going to happen. So the more sensible ruling is to say that Trump can't block anyone.

I think a better offline analogy would be if the president mailed out copies of his official statements a few days after he made them (to the general public), and included a random sample of letters to the editor about the statement. Then one day he starts filtering out letters from those he considers troublemakers.

I'm not sure there's any law requiring him to include anyone's letter; it seems he'd have unlimited discretion on whose letters he wants to bundle. I don't see how 1st Amendment rights would ever require the president to let someone use that venue for speaking.

I would imagine it’s analogous to blocking phone numbers on the White House switchboard: freedom of speech in this context means that the President cannot artificially limit who speaks to him through publicly-available means.

Yes, he doesn't have to listen to the callers, but he has to allow people to be able to contact him.

I'm not sure if replies to a tweet from someone who blocked you are associated with the tweet you replied to.

If not, the followers would not see the reply in that thread/ conversation.

Blocking on Twitter also prevents the blocked user from view the blocker's timeline, which means Trump would be preventing US citizens from viewing his "public statements"

Edit: Is this being downvoted because of some inferred snark? None was intended.

You can kind of get around this by viewing the site while logged out. But I don't know if that kind of thing is supported in any of the apps, so it's a big hoop to jump through.

Oh this is definitely true of the Twitter website but I would assume any barrier implemented is illegal, however ineffectual.

You are being downvoted because you are wrong. Blocked users can log out and read to their hearts' content.

> Blocked users can log out and read to their hearts' content.

So private citizens now have to work around a block from President of the United States in order to read official communication? Is that the kind of country you want to live in?

You know for sure as shit that homeboy was blocking more then Rolex watch spammers and markov chain bots. He was blocking the accounts of journalists, dissenters, and other private citizens. That is a fucked up thing for somebody who is a public official. What kind of dangerous precedent does allowing that kind of behavior set?

How is logging out of Twitter a workaround? The blocking doesn't prevent anyone from reading the communications anymore than not being allowed into the Brady Room prevents anyone from seeing White House press conferences.

Not arguing one way or the other with regards to the original topic, but you are jumping to conclusions with no basis. "Private citizens" as a set naturally do not have to work around anything, as being a private citizen does not imply that one has a Twitter account. Entities (private citizens, corporations, or whatever else) that own a Twitter account, have done something that Trump believes warrants blocking, and are logged in, are prevented from viewing his tweets while logged into that specific account.

The argument that anybody is prevented specifically from "reading" official communication is paper thin. The problem was that the government was effectively blocking private citizens' ability to reply and share under their preferred (potentially verified) identity.

That would be akin to saying you can access your President by giving up your passport. I can't believe people are defending this.

If you truly believe having to log out to read a tweet is akin to giving up your passport, you are insane.

Yes, losing passport is exactly that. Logging out makes me unable to access normal abilities a twitter user(american citizen) has. If passport analogy doesn't suit you, try incarceration.

This comment affirms my adjudication.

Pretty sure you can't directly reply to the Tweets of people who blocked you. So if Trump blocks someone on Twitter, they're no longer able to participate in conversations resulting from his tweets. (Unless they just make a new account, of course.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com