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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> If your account gets banned.... Wouldn't it thus be a violation of the first amendment?

Not unless the government is the entity doing the banning (or collaborating with Twitter to ban accounts at its request).

If the government ran its own Mastodon instance, then there would be an argument to be made that it couldn't ban users on that Mastodon instance, depending on the nature of that Mastodon instance and what it's used for. But that's not what's happening. The government does not run Twitter in any way; they're simply users of the platform, and the government's ability to use features of the platform (such as the "block" feature) may be limited by existing laws, the same way the government's ability to do other things in life is limited by existing laws.

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Can we use a more common example?

If one of the ways to interact with the executive branch is by calling the white house, wouldn't telecoms banning you from having a phone number be a more similar analogy?

> If one of the ways to interact with the executive branch is by calling the white house, wouldn't telecoms banning you from having a phone number be a more similar analogy?

No, because that's not what this ruling does. This ruling says that the White House can't block incoming calls from a specific number.

(Though even that's not really a great analogy, because phone numbers are not considered to correspond uniquely or permanently to an individual the way that social media accounts are).

The parent comment was about Twitter banning individuals, not about the ruling:

> Surely that must mean that Twitter banning people is also a violation of the first amendment

> The parent comment was about Twitter banning individuals, not about the ruling:

Right, and it's nonsensical to apply the first amendment to Twitter, because, broadly speaking, users don't have standing to make First Amendment claims against a private entity like Twitter.

If Twitter is banning people in a problematic way, or in problematic numbers, then there might be an argument that the government can't use Twitter to publish breaking news or announce policy changes. There are, in fact, separate lawsuits around this. But still, that's a far cry from saying "Twitter banning people is a violation of the First Amendment".

You always have the option to communicate with the government via first-class letter delivered by the US Postal Service, or by showing up in person during the openly published hours of operation.

If the government, for some reason, decided to only communicate via telephone calls, there would still be no duty on any private phone company to provide anyone with the ability to call the government. The government would implicitly require itself to start up and operate a public telephone company, so that any person unwilling or unable to make phone calls via a private company could use it to communicate with the government instead.

In all likelihood, this would mean that VoIP phone booths would appear in every post office, and only calls from those phones to phones registered to government offices would be connected. They wouldn't even necessarily have to use phone numbers or connect to the PSTN; a .gov or .us SIP registration server would do.

For private services, if the government uses them at all, it must use them in a fair and nondiscriminatory manner. The private company has no duty to enforce this on its government users, or to police their behavior.

>Not unless the government is the entity doing the banning (or collaborating with Twitter to ban accounts at its request).

But twitter is working with the government in hosting the tweets and thus assumes responsibility to provide a public square, in which case it cannot ban people.

Otherwise government should be banned from using twitter because by picking a private company to put government messages on, the government official (in this case Trump) is picking that company's existing policy (what ever it may be) as a means of banning people, which the government isn't allowed to do.

> Otherwise government should be banned from using twitter because by picking a private company to put government messages on, the government official (in this case Trump) is picking that company's existing policy (what ever it may be) as a means of banning people, which the government isn't allowed to do.

Bingo.

I'm assuming you're a developer. Have you ever wanted to leverage a piece of code, say GPL licensed, that does everything you want it to, checks off all of the development boxes, would make your life amazing.... but were forced to go with something else because of compliance? Same thing here. Just because Twitter does everything functionally they need, if it forces them into situations that would run afoul of their requirements, then they're forced to go a different avenue.

But twitter is working with the government in hosting the tweets and thus assumes responsibility to provide a public square

No. No it doesn't. Allowing the government to use your service does not thereby make it part of the government.

So you're saying if fox news set up a 'private' website to host trump's posts and only allowed pro-trump people to comment that wouldnt violate free speech because it is a private website and the government itself isn't banning people who criticize it.

Fox News wouldn't violate the first amendment. At most, the POTUS might be prevented from using that website.

(Nitpick: "free speech" is a general philosophical concept; we're talking about the 1st Amendment, which is a particular application of one of many views on that concept)

So if Trump isn't banned from using that website, where is the difference from this case?

I'm confused, what website? The hypothetical one? Who said he wouldn't be?

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