First Amendment Group Urges Ocasio-Cortez Representative to Unlock Users

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University announced Thursday that it had asked the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to unblock all Twitter users that she would have banned. because of their political opinions.

The Knight Institute, which successfully sued President Donald Trump on his decision to block dozens of Twitter users from his personal account @realdonaldtrump, wrote to Ocasio-Cortez asking him not to block subscribers because from their points of view. He said the practice "is unconstitutional, and we write in the hope of dissuading you from engaging."

Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat in the first term, was sued by former Democratic Democrat of New York State Dov Hikind for having blocked his account @AOC staff.

The Knight Institute argued that its account, with 5.3 million followers, "is a" public forum "within the meaning of the First Amendment" and noted that its tweets about its political positions "have made it one of the newspapers ".

His office did not immediately comment. Twitter declined to comment.

Ocasio-Cortez, however, has the right to block Twitter users who have issued a threatening speech, noted the group.

Ocasio-Cortez lawyers said in a letter dated Aug. 14 that the use of his Twitter account was not equivalent to Trump's. They claimed that she had not blocked Hikind because of her political views and denied using her account to make official announcements.

Last month, Hikind tweeted, "No one is above the law. If the courts have ruled that POTUS can not block people on Twitter, why

@AOC thinks she can silence her critics? "

Last week, Trump challenged a federal court of appeal ruling that he was violating the US Constitution by blocking people he hated from his account.

Trump asked for a rehearing in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, calling the decision 3-0 "fundamentally ill-conceived".

Trump has 63.7 million followers on Twitter and often uses his account to make important announcements.

In July, the court of appeal upheld the decision of a 2018 trial court binding Trump to unblock dozens of followers.

Ocasio-Cortez, citing Ocasio-Cortez, said in a dossier in support of Mr Trump's request: because this same speech may

strip them of their pre-existing rights to exclude and submit any action they have taken on this account to a constitutional review. "

The Court of Appeal concluded that Trump's account was "all that was an official account, a state-run account" and was "one of the main vehicles of the White House for the conduct of its official business" .