Barack Obama may have been the first president on Twitter, but Donald Trump is no doubt the first “Twitter President.” His use of the social networking site began long before he ran for president and includes many blocked accounts. Now, members of the left are trying to sue him for blocking the trolls.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at New York’s Columbia University filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump for blocking critics on Twitter.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer and White House director of social media Daniel Scavino are named as co-defendants along with Trump in the lawsuit filed Tuesday.
“President Trump’s Twitter account has become an important source of news and information about the government, and an important public forum for speech by, to, and about the president,” the lawsuit reads. “In an effort to suppress dissent in this forum, defendants have excluded — blocked — Twitter users who have criticized the president or his policies. This practice is unconstitutional, and this suit seeks to end it.”
But these anti-Trump activists didn’t seem to care about the first amendment rights of Milo Yinnanopolous. He got banned from Twitter for provocative conservative commentary — and the Knight First Amendment Insititute was silent.
Twitter has permanently banned a rightwing writer and notorious troll for his role in the online abuse of Leslie Jones over her role in the Ghostbusters reboot.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.
They also didn’t seem to mind when Barack Obama blocked a black conservative teen on the platform.
The president of the United States is the president of all the people, as Barack Obama has many times said. But, it would seem, that doesn’t mean he wants to hear from all the people in his Twitter mentions.
CJ Pearson, a 13-year-old black student whose video commentaries against liberalism and the president’s policies have gone viral, learned this lesson the hard way.
Pearson has recently launched a petition to get an interview with President Obama on the White House’s website and was using his Twitter account to garner signatures. Then he discovered the president, or the staffers who run his official @POTUS account, had blocked him.
Selective outrage: It may be the left’s best skill.
Source: Breitbart, Guardian. Daily Caller
Image: Gage Skidmore
Get a life