Article from Reason by Jacob Sullum.

Yesterday, on the same day that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that Donald Trump cannot constitutionally block Twitter users whose views offend him, two critics of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) filed lawsuits arguing that the same rule should apply to her. “Just today, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a ruling that elected officials cannot block individuals from their Twitter accounts,” one of the plaintiffs, former New York state legislator Dov Hikind, told Fox News.

While that is not quite what the 2nd Circuit held, Hikind’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, makes a plausible case that Ocasio-Cortez’s main Twitter account, @AOC, functions in a way similar to the president’s @realDonaldTrump account. While both Trump and Ocasio-Cortez established their accounts before they were elected, they both use them for what seem to be official government purposes. And while both also have “official” accounts (@POTUS and @repAOC, respectively), their ostensibly personal accounts are much more popular as forums for discussing policy and politics (with 26 million vs. 62 million followers in Trump’s case and 4.7 million vs. 172,000 in Ocasio-Cortez’s).

Ocasio-Cortez’s account, like Trump’s, identifies her by her government title and features photographs related to her official work. Hikind says @AOC is “the account to which AOC regularly posts and engages in…political speech” and “advocates for her positions.” He argues that “AOC uses Twitter as an important public forum for speech,” noting that she “uses Twitter to make formal announcements, opine on a range of social matters both domestic and abroad, endorse candidates, engage with follow[er]s of her account, [and] promote Defendant’s agenda.” Her recent tweets, for example, include posts about her Green New Deal, her questions about unemployment during a congressional hearing, criminal justice reform, border enforcement, Republican sexism, her pursuit of “environmental justice,” and various pieces of legislation she has sponsored.

Ocasio-Cortez, like Trump, generally makes the “interactive space” associated with her account available to all comers. But she makes exceptions for certain Twitter users, such as Hikind and Republican congressional candidate Joseph Saladino (the plaintiff in the other Twitter blocking lawsuit filed against Ocasio-Cortez yesterday), whose opinions annoy her. “The manner in which AOC uses the @AOC Twitter account makes it a public forum under the First Amendment,” Hikind argues. “Plaintiff respectfully ask[s] that this Court declare that the viewpoint-based exclusion occurring here violates the First Amendment, order the Defendant to restore Mr. Hikind’s access, and bar Defendant from blocking access to her twitter account.”

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: nrkbeta [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]