Noah Feldman, Columnist

Constitution Can't Stop Trump From Blocking Tweets

Twitter as a private company can set the rules, even for a public figure like the president.

June 7, 2017 at 4:39 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Kudos for creativity to the new Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which has alleged that the First Amendment bars President Donald Trump from blocking followers on his Twitter account. Unfortunately, the law runs to the contrary. There’s no right to free speech on Twitter. The only rule is that Twitter Inc. gets to decide who speaks and listens -- which is its right under the First Amendment. If Twitter wants to block Trump, it can. If Trump wants to block followers, he can.

Trump’s account can’t be a “designated public forum,” as the center claims, because it isn’t public at all. Rather, Trump’s account is a stream of communication that’s wholly owned by Twitter, a private company with First Amendment rights of its own.