Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia Univ. v. Trump

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
928 F.3d 226 (2019)

ELI5:

Rule of Law:

A public official who utilizes a social media account for official government purposes creates a public forum in the account's interactive spaces and, therefore, may not exclude persons from that forum based on their political viewpoints without violating the First Amendment.

Facts:

In March 2009, Donald J. Trump established the Twitter account with the handle @realDonaldTrump.
After his inauguration as President in January 2017, Trump used the account extensively to announce official policies, describe and defend his administration's actions, and engage in foreign policy.
The account's presentation bore official trappings, including being registered to the '45th President of the United States' and featuring photos of official duties, and the National Archives and Records Administration considered the tweets to be official records.
The account was open to the public, allowing any user to reply to, retweet, and 'like' the President's tweets, which created public interactive comment threads.
In May and June 2017, several Twitter users (the Individual Plaintiffs) posted replies to the account that were critical of President Trump or his policies.
As a direct result of posting these critical replies, President Trump used Twitter's 'blocking' feature on each of the Individual Plaintiffs.
Being blocked prevented the Individual Plaintiffs from viewing the President's tweets while logged into their accounts, directly replying to them, or otherwise participating in the comment threads associated with the President's tweets.

Procedural Posture:

The Individual Plaintiffs and the Knight First Amendment Institute sued President Trump and White House staff members in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The complaint alleged that blocking the plaintiffs from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account violated the First Amendment.
Both parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment in the trial court.
The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, issuing a declaratory judgment that the blocking violated the First Amendment.
President Trump, the defendant, appealed this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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Issue:

Does a public official's act of blocking individuals from the interactive spaces of an official social media account, because of the political views they expressed, constitute viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment?

Opinions:

Majority - Barrington D. Parker

Yes. A public official's act of blocking individuals from an official social media account based on their expressed viewpoints violates the First Amendment. The court reasoned that although President Trump established the account as a private citizen, his use of it since taking office transformed it into an official channel of governance. The pervasive evidence of official use—including policy announcements, staff changes, foreign relations, and its treatment as an official record by the National Archives—demonstrates that the President and his staff were acting in a governmental capacity. By opening the interactive features of the account to the public, the President created a public forum. While the President's own tweets constitute government speech, the interactive space for replies and comments by the public does not. Blocking users from this forum because they expressed critical views is a form of prohibited viewpoint discrimination, and the existence of potential 'workarounds' does not cure this constitutional violation because they still impose an unconstitutional burden on speech.

Analysis:

This decision established a significant precedent by applying the traditional public forum doctrine to the digital sphere of social media. It clarifies that when a public official uses a personal social media account as an instrument of governance, that account becomes subject to First Amendment constraints against viewpoint discrimination. The ruling has broad implications for how elected officials at all levels of government must manage their social media interactions, effectively preventing them from silencing critics in online spaces they control for official purposes. This case sets a framework for analyzing whether an official's social media activity constitutes state action, influencing future cases concerning free speech on digital platforms.

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