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Comment by Karishma1234 | Hacker News Reader

I am not legal expert but it makes perfect sense that any government official must not deny access to information to any citizen which is easily available to another.

Blocking means other person can not see trump's tweets. I believe Trump can always mute other people.

Let us consider the following scenarios :

- Trump blocks only black people on Twitter. - Hawaii's missile alert systems issues a real missile alert on their Twitter but Mr X does not get it because he was blocked by them. - Mr. Joe goes to local DMV to get a driving manual. DMV clerk closes the window on his face and refused to give him the manual.

How is twitter scenario different here ?

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More importantly, blocking someone on Twitter prevents them from evoking your Twitter handle or retweeting you.

So, in the President's case, if someone is retweeting him and criticizing his words, or calling him out by his Twitter handle in a way that he doesn't like, he can block them and literally prevent them from posting certain content about him.

This is mindbogglingly unethical.

That's false. You can still post whatever you want about Trump on twitter. You just cant post it as a reply to his tweets.

Interesting too since Twitter makes all tweets public, thus an incognito window could still see those tweets. Which means that it's more about account notification and other tweet prioritization "features" of the platform that are related to getting news/information.

If this is the case, what does this mean for twitter's algorithms in deciding what to show you first - a democrat you follow or a republic you follow that both talk about a topic you care about (for example cotton picking in Texas)... Would this by any chance have an effect on that?

Block also makes it so people can't harass you. I think this is an important distinction.

By saying you can't block someone the judge is also saying you can't ignore someone who is harassing you.

Anyone who isn't logged in can still see it. They can just open an incognito window. They aren't really blocked from viewing his tweets.

It's unfortunate that the 2 are tied together into the same function. This would be a much simpler and less controversial issue then.

He could still mute someone which would keep their tweets from showing up but not prevent them from viewing his.

This is also probably moot since verified accounts reportedly have even better options for filtering out messages than normal users.

> This is also probably moot since verified accounts reportedly have even better options for filtering out messages than normal users.

Verified accounts don't. We have an extra tab to view only notifications from other verified users, but that's it.

If you have a large volume of notifications (e.g. a tweet goes viral), they give you a modal to prompt you to set up filters, but AFAIK those filters aren't limited to verified users. A non-verified user would still get that modal, which is just pointing you towards features already in the Settings page.

Source: am verified on Twitter, and also have had tweets popular enough to trigger that modal.

I think my impression might have been obsolete dating back before Twitter opened the quality filter & the other options up to general users.

I believe Trump would still be able to Mute people.

> Anyone who isn't logged in can still see it. They can just open an incognito window. They aren't really blocked from viewing his tweets.

If you read what you are arguing here out loud to yourself, it is immediately obvious why this "workaround" is a scary-bad precedent to set.

In order to view official communications from an elected official (i.e. the president of the united states), some citizens must "just" open an incognito window in order to work around the fact that the President of the United States blocked them from viewing official communication!

Go ahead, say that out loud to yourself! It is what some folks are arguing is okay. What kind of dystopian nightmare slippery slope path to hell is that shit? How more people aren't terrified of the precent allowing such a thing to occur is beyond me.

Saying it is okay that citizens have to work around government instituted blocks in order to hear from their elected officials. That is complete bollocks. "Shithole countries" with "shithole governments" pull bullshit stunts like blocking citizens access to official communication. I'd like to think America aspires to be better than that.

That's not what I'm saying. I agree that they should not be able to block people from seeing official communications, but I also argue that they should be able to ignore people who are harassing them.

Separating the 2 would solve this conflict.

At the same time though, if you think opening an incognito window is too much of a workaround for viewing public communications, what do you call just about every interaction with the government that is much more painful.

I wish every interaction with the government was as painless as opening an incognito window.

Especially the convoluted system we are required to use to file taxes. It's 1000x more convoluted and time consuming, and that is a requirement just to not be illegal.

> They should be able to ignore people who are harassing them.

They still can do that. This ruling does not say he can't mute people (prevent himself from seeing any of their posts). The ruling says that he can't block people (prevent the entire world from seeing their replies to his posts).

You need to define harassment. For example what kind of harassment is avoided by blocking instead of just muting a person ?

> They can just open an incognito window. They aren't really blocked from viewing his tweets.

What if your local DMV tells a black citizen to go to some other DMV and get a driving manual ?

Secondly, if you are an ordinary person and I retweet your every tweet calling you a moron you might consider it harassment and block me but public officials do not have such luxury. It is a very fundamental feature of American democracy to call your president an idiot. He can't claim harassment there.

You bring up valid points. I wasn't aware there was block and mute as separate functions.

> What if your local DMV tells a black citizen to go to some other DMV and get a driving manual ?

Not sure the relevance to this discussion. What you are describing is racism, not denying access to problematic individuals.

I think the point here is there is no black and white answer, it falls on a spectrum. The "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" is fine if you are a small mom and pop shop but not as you get bigger. Especially if you provide critical infrastructure or government function. Not sure it can be codified in an absolute law though.

I don’t think it should matter, legally, that Twitter ties the two into the same function. You can’t break the law just because some third party requires you to do it as part of something else that you want. If the law means that Twitter’s stupid design makes you unable to block harassment, then you should convince Twitter to change it, put up with it, or stop using Twitter.

Doesn't it just mean you have to click one button, "logout", to read the tweets?

Yeah, and now you can't respond to anything he says. You've had your voice taken away. The only way back into the conversation is to create a new Twitter account (in violation of the Twitter TOS).

And if you log back in with the blocked account, and try to tweet @realDonaldTrump, it will prevent you from posting because he blocked you, preventing you from using his Twitter handle in any way.

You also cannot retweet him anymore, which is a common way of publicly condemning the things he says.

In the hands of the President, the block feature is a powerful censorship tool.

>Yeah, and now you can't respond to anything he says. You've had your voice taken away. The only way back into the conversation is to create a new Twitter account (in violation of the Twitter TOS).

When Trump uses his phone to talk to some people but doesn't take my call, is my voice taken away?

Sounds to me more like Trump can set up so that your phone calls are dropped every time you mention Trump in your conversation.

> Yeah, and now you can't respond to anything he says. You've had your voice taken away.

Not really. I mean, what did we do before Twitter came along?

Before Twitter came along the president didn't have the legal ability to prevent you from criticizing him in any other venue either.

Trump removed plenty of hecklers from his campaign events.

Good point. If critical tweets kept him from giving his message then I expect the judge would have ruled differently.

He had not been elected yet. The moment he did, things changed.

Certainly he continues to remove hecklers from his campaign events. The distinction is a campaign event isn’t a “public forum”.

Campaign events are generally not public forums, even if the candidate happens to also be an incumbent public official. For a federal official (and similar laws exist for state government), if the nexus with official government affairs required to make a public forum existed with a campaign event, that’d probably violate the Hatch Act separately from whether any violation of public forum law occurred.

Blocking means your voice is take away. You can't retweet or respond.

Trump could just mute you and no matter what you do he wont be bothered. When he blocks he is taking away your right to critise him on that platform using your own handle.

Reading isn't actually the main issue, response visibility is; the official account creates a virtual forum by the way Twitter operates, and blocking by viewpoint prevents certain viewpoints from being expressed within that government-created forum.

The government can't create a public forum and then control what views are expressed in that forum.

So can twitter ban me from using their services or viewing tweets? If we declare twitter the same as a DMV window, it greatly complicates the public/private division.

And what if Trump abandons twitter and decides to join chirper (I made that up, no relationship with anything that might have that name) which is just like twitter but invite only and has an open policy of banning liberals (which a private company is allowed to do), then what does this ruling mean? Does it mean that no government official can make use of any private company that has any level of discrimination against certain users (and by this I mean a legal discrimination, not based on protected class)? What about Trump joining a private club that doesn't let everyone be members?

These sound like really good questions for a court to decide.

Because Twitter is not a government owned entity, the government should have no right to force the use or means of use of a private tool. Now if the tool was a government utility, it would be a different story.

Nobody is forcing Trump to use Twitter. They are saying that if he uses Twitter, he must leave his tweets open to all the public and not a subset. President Trump could always choose to close his account if he finds this requirement to be too onerous.

Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts?

I don't see how anyone, president or otherwise, can't chose whom they send messages to.

His official communications are in fact required to comply with federal records law. Obviously that’s not the same as being public now but they would need to be given to the National Archives at the end of his term and eventually released following the standard process for handling secrecy concerns.

He can certainly send private emails, Slack messages, or even Twitter DMs. What he can't do is publicly broadcast his tweets to the world, and then exclude people from them on political grounds.

> He can certainly send private emails, Slack messages, or even Twitter DMs.

Pretty sure he can't and if he is, he better be complying with federal records laws or else he'd be living a double standard. You may recall him blasting another, very popular candidate in the 2016 election for using personal email to conduct official business. Using slack / private email / twitter DM's is basically the same damn thing.

> What he can't do is publicly broadcast his tweets to the world, and then exclude people from them on political grounds.

What if he blocks them on non-political grounds. Maybe they made fun of his mother, or dog, or threatened to throw dirty socks on his lawn, should be be able to block them then?

While I realize the article/judge's opinion specifically calls out political speech, I'm fairly sure that applies to all speech, and the political speech subset was probably chosen by the plaintiffs as an easier path to victory.

> publicly broadcast his tweets to the world, and then exclude people

Are they really public in that case?

The President can share information with 1 person, 2 people, 3 people, or 336m people (the number of Twitter users). But he can't share information with 335m people?

It should be noted that the problem identified by the judge was the fact that blocking prevents users from replying to the tweets, therefore restricting their speech.

That said, excluding certain people from official communications based on their opinions might be illegal too: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/politics/white-house-b...

He can send messages at his discretion. With Twitter, however, tweets are (in this case) considered public announcements, with blocked people being exceptions on a personal level, and the ruling is that he is not allowed to make those exceptions. He still has access to direct messages, AFAIK. With Slack and Facebook, I can imagine comparable situations arising with similar principles.

> Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts?

If they are being used to conduct official business, most likely yes. They will need to comply with federal regulations for data retention, public disclosure (or confidentiality as the case may be), etc.

You may recall another candidate who was running for president in 2016 getting raked under the coals for using personal email to conduct federal business.

> I don't see how anyone, president or otherwise, can't chose whom they send messages to.

What's to not understand? They are acting in an official capacity. Thus they are legally and ethically bound to a higher standard.

> You may recall another candidate who was running for president in 2016 getting raked under the coals for using personal email to conduct federal business.

I thought the other candidate was raked over the coals for jeopardizing national security?

In any case, I speak of Trump's "government" Twitter, "government" Gmail, "government" Slack, and "government" Facebook. (IDK how such a distinction is made, but I would like to compare apples to apples.)

Please look up what the Republicans were saying about Hillary Clinton's private email server.

For years.

And years.

Actually, yes. Every single one of those should be recorded, and made available after declassified. All communications of the President are to be recorded for that reason.

> They are saying that if he uses Twitter, he must leave his tweets open to all the public and not a subset.

But they are. Click logout if you’re one of the few professional Twitter trolls that actually managed to get his attention.

That he must leave his tweets open to all the public, and not prevent certain people from directly criticizing him in public either.

> Click logout if you’re one of the few professional Twitter trolls that actually managed to get his attention

I.e. "people the President of the United States doesn't like". Even if those people have every right to have their voice be heard--as enshrined in the constitution. Saying "oh, they can just view his posts by going into incognito mode" is a pretty slippery slope to saying it is okay for the government to actively block certain undesirables from accessing government communication.

What kind of totalitarian government are you arguing for?

Then maybe the government should not use twitter for any official statements? Why should they be allowed to get around the rules by using twitter?

What's an "official statement"? Sounds like it's probably any public statement.

The government can set its own rules and restrictions for the use of a private service for it's employees.

There is no need for a tool to be owned by the government to be utilized by the government.

Correct, Twitter is not. The judge made no ruling regarding the functionality of Twitter. What the judge ruled on is what a government employee is allowed to do in respect to using the tool. You are still welcome to block people. Trump is not.

The government can, however force it's members to abide by certain regulations. That includes Trump.

The government is not enforcing a rule upon a private entity. It is enforcing a rule upon itself, specifically on the office of the president, and as embodied in the person currently occupying that office.

Twitter, as a private entity, has the option to wipe out a user's block list, or to save it now and restore it later, and in the wake of this ruling, would be publicly justified in doing so for the @realdonaldtrump user. They would only be helping that particular user to obey the rules of their office. But they can also ignore it completely, and leave it to Trump to clear his own block list. The court might request Twitter's assistance in checking on whether its ruling is being honored, and they might choose to cooperate, or not, in the absence of any legal compulsion to do so.

This isn't a Twitter thing. It's a government thing.

The same thing has happened to government officials or agencies who blocked local gadflies and protesters from their Facebook pages.

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