One of the dumbest things about Donald Trump’s Presidency – and believe me there are a whole host of dumb things to choose from – is definitely his refusal to stop using Twitter and tweeting whatever he thinks, even when it directly contradicts what White House staffers are relaying to the world. It’s a shitshow basically, culminating last week when he accidentally tweeted something that made no sense and wasn’t deleted for about seven hours. Smooth.
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Things might be getting worse for Trump’s Twitter account though as it’s emerged that he’s blocked several accounts that regularly make fun of and criticise him. Whilst this is undeniably pathetic, you can kind of understand why Trump and his team might want to do this as pretty much the top ranked reply to one of his tweets is someone dissing him. Still, if you’re gonna say such stupid stuff all the time you should probably be prepared to deal with the consequences.
Whilst everyone against Trump will probably think that this is lame, there’s also a far more significant issue, as the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York has claimed that his actions are unconstitutional. Alex Abdo, the institute’s senior staff attorney, said the following:
Twitter is like a modern form of town hall meeting or public comment periods for government agency proposals – both venues where US law requires even-handed treatment of speech.
Blocking users denies the right to free speech – previous cases involving politicians blocking users on Facebook have supported this position.
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The Institute have written to Trump asking him to stop blocking accounts and to unblock the ones that he already has done. I’m sure we can all guess where that letter is probably going to go.
Following on from that, the Institute’s next option would be to sue him, but are they really going to have the guts to do that? Imagine the headlines: ‘President Trump impeached due to Twitter activity’ – I suppose it is 2017 so I shouldn’t be so surprised at something as stupid as that.
For more dumb headlines, check out everything Trump has done this year. No joke.
