I find Twitter distasteful, annoying, even stupid. I sometimes wonder why I should care about that particular “micro-blogging” platform.
But since it is a big deal to others, I struggle to understand.*
Joining me in the struggle are our two most famous political Twitterers, President Donald Trump and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.).
The president lost in court the other day, with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals telling him he must no longer block users on the social media platform.
Now AOC finds herself in a similar pickle. On Tuesday, a former Democratic New York Assemblyman filed a lawsuit in federal court against the popular freshman U.S. Representative for doing the same thing Trump had been doing: blocking users on Twitter based on their personal viewpoints.
The litigant surmises that AOC had blocked him “apparently because my critique of her tweets and policies have been too stinging.”
Ouch?
“Twitter is a public space,” insists this Democrat, Dov Hikind, “and all should have access to the government officials on it.”
This puts me in a pickle, too. I am all for government transparency — and I do think officials and representatives should not be completely insulated from the citizens they serve. But we don’t have a right to follow them into their bedrooms or bathrooms.
So, high-profile federal employees who in any way discuss public matters on social media should not be allowed to block Americans from seeing their posts. But take pity on the poor pols: they should be able to mute users, that is, keep others from cluttering up their social media experience.
Oddly, the lawsuit does not address this muting option.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I even use it, occasionally.
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4 replies on “Transparent on Twitter?”
This will be the death of twitter. Someone will write a program to send 10,000 tweets a day to someone they don’t like which will make that guys twitter account unusable.
Public officials can’t have it both ways. If they want to “keep others from cluttering up their social media experience” then let them get a separate twitter id for private use. As long as they want us to ‘follow’ them on Twitter, then they should take all comers. If they are going to make official statements using their government twitter account, then they should have to take all that goes with it. They shouldn’t be allowed to ‘block’ the public that pays their salary and provides them with this access.
As for someone writing a program to automatically send out thousands of messages to the same person, that is a problem for Twitter programmers to correct. It’s called system maintenance.
Never mind. Pat just said pretty much what I intended to say. If they choose to use it for business purposes (which both Trump and AOC clearly do) then they have to abide by that part of the First Amendment about petitioning for a redress of grievances.
I agree with Pat; they shouldn’t have it both ways.
They, the pols, can always “vote with their feet” if they don’t like the way their tweets are received they can simply stop saying things that are controversial or stp Tweeting altogether.