A federal district court has ruled in a Virginia case that under the First Amendment, an elected government official may not block social media users from expressing views the officials consider repugnant. The ruling provided an answer to the question of whether President Donald Trump can continue to block users on Twitter. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia has sued Trump to prevent the practice. (Slate, July 28,2017, by Mark Joseph Stern)
Law professor Eugene Volokh, The Washington Post, June 6, 2017, argues that the Trump Twitter account is a product of Trump-the-man, not generated as part of his executive duties, and “therefore not constrained by the First Amendment.”
The Knight lawyers claim that with his Twitter account, Trump has set up a public forum and could be governed by a set of reasonable rules but still as open as a school board meeting. (CNN, June 6, 2017, by Selena Larson)