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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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