Courtesy of HuffPo:Trump has blocked me from reading his tweets. I may have to kill myself.— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 13, 2017
At 8:10 a.m. Tuesday, the progressive veterans advocacy group VoteVets alerted its Twitter followers that it had been blocked by President Donald Trump.
Hours later, the novelist Stephen King let it be known that he too had been stymied from viewing Trump’s 140-character missives. Jordan Uhl, an organizer known for quickly responding to Trump’s tweets with what can best be described as trollish behavior, said he also was blocked on Tuesday. As did Brandon Neely, a former Guantanamo Bay guard who’s been a Trump critic.
The seemingly thought-through effort by Trump, or whoever is running his account, to keep people from viewing his tweets is not the most outrageous example of government secrecy exhibited by this administration.
However it is bad enough that it has inspired those who were blocked to fight back.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is representing the legion of the Trump-blocked. Their argument has been that there is something fundamentally unconstitutional about a president restricting access to what are definitionally public proclamations.
“Twitter is many things at once,” the Institute’s executive director, Jameel Jaffer, told HuffPost. “It is a broadcast mechanism and being blocked from the president’s Twitter account means it is harder to get access to his statements on Twitter and sometimes those statements are important.... If you’re a critic you don’t have access on the same terms as everyone else.”
The group has reached out to Trump's social media guru but have not heard back as of this post.
Kind of ironic that the guy who has used Twitter for years to attack everybody from the Pope to Rosie O'Donnel is such a little snowflake that he himself cannot take a little criticism.
Maybe if everybody who was blocked gathered around a table to tell Trump what an awesome tweeter he was, reminiscent of that bizarre cabinet meeting, he would agree to unblock them.
Yeah fat chance of that happening.
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