![]() Second, the holdings empower crafty politicians-who already routinely and proudly violate the First Amendment-to exploit the gap between a private account’s freedoms and a government account’s obligations, selectively excluding others from public forums. If the public forum designation remains under the private account’s tweet after the government retweet, that prohibits the private user from blocking others, thereby infringing on the private user’s freedom of association however, if the private user retains the freedom to block others, that effectively allows the private user to control speech within the public forum, thus dissolving the public forum’s integrity. This conflict arises when a government account retweets a private account the space below a private account’s tweet where users can exercise their freedom of association by excluding other users, and the replies to the government retweet-a public forum-become the same space. First, as applied, they create an irresolvable tension between the public forum doctrine and the freedom of association. ![]() Current First Amendment holdings posit that government Twitter accounts-including any replies from third parties that are posted on them-are public forums, yet these holdings are fundamentally misguided and ham-fisted in application. Your ability to interact with your elected representative’s public statements is restricted because of a private Twitter user who blocked you.Īs the law stands, this hypothetical is a legal reality. You are cabined into a muted discourse where you cannot fully participate in the political discussion. You cannot see your senator’s latest thoughts, nor can you respond to your senator or others talking to her. Your feed is completely different from your friend’s feed. His version shows dozens of retweets containing controversial topics and disputed statistics, all from the same alternative news source that blocked you. Your friend shows you his view of the senator’s account. Confused, you go to your senator’s Twitter feed and only see boring tweets about financial grants and Senate procedural issues. In between sips of a margarita, your friend says he was looking at your senator’s Twitter account and was wondering what you thought of her. Ī few days later, you talk to your friend at lunch. You reply with facts reported from other sources. In the retweet, the news source reported an erroneous figure and editorialized on the misconstrued statistic. ![]() While scrolling through your timeline, you notice that someone you follow retweeted an account that prides itself as an alternative news source to the mainstream media. Say you are on Twitter scrolling past sports highlights, animal-adoption videos, and news stories about the upcoming election. Third-Party Control Exerted by Commenters Blocking Others Social Media Policies and Public Forum Doctrine GG: How Governments Can Respect the First Amendment and Current Law Cheat Codes: Elected Representatives Relish Violating the First Amendment It’s a Feature: Exploiting the Gap Between the Law and Twitter’s Settings Inherent Contradictions: The Disintegration of Public Forum Integrity or Elimination of the Freedom of Association First Amendment Tensions Created by the Courts
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