Washington, United States.
the United States Supreme Court dismissed on Monday a case on whether former US President Donald Trump could block users on Twitter, considering it “irrelevant” because the former president has already relinquished power.
The Supreme Court ruled it closed a case that began in 2017 and that it lost some of its meaning when Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account last January, following the assault of his followers on the Capitol, but that it could have set precedents on how people can use social media who are in power.
The country’s highest court did not assess Twitter’s decision to take Trump into account, although one of the court’s conservative judges he was in favor of assessing the former president’s party concerns about the power of this and other social media companies.
legal doctrines
“Soon we will have no choice but to address the issue of how our legal doctrines apply to information infrastructures highly concentrated and privately owned, such as digital platforms, ”wrote Magistrate Clarence Thomas.
the decision of the Supreme of this Monday was unanimous and ordered to declare null, for “irrelevant”, the decision of a court of appeals based in New York, which had concluded in 2019 that Trump had no right to block users from the your Twitter account.
The case began in July 2017, when the Knight Institute for the First Amendment of Columbia University (New York) He sued Trump on behalf of seven social media users whom the president had blocked.
The complainants argued that the president was using his personal account (@realDonaldTrump) To spread official Government information, So their messages had to be accessible to everyone.
the Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit concluded in 2019 that Trump had violated the blocking of these accounts the first amendment of the American Constitution, Which guarantees freedom of expression, because he was a public official who used his networks for official purposes.