This morning the SCOTUS issued orders in pending cases. One of those cases
ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT
involved President Trump and Twitter. The case was dismissed as moot in a 2-3 sentence order, but Justice Thomas filed a 12 page concurrence (which begins on p. 9 of the pdf). Here's what the case was about, as summarized by Thomas:
Donald Trump, then President of the United States, blocked several users from interacting with his Twitter account. They sued. The Second Circuit held that the comment threads were a “public forum” and that then-President Trump violated the First Amendment by using his control of the Twitter account to block the plaintiffs from accessing the comment threads. ... But Mr. Trump, it turned out, had only limited control of the account; Twitter has permanently removed the account from the platform.
That brief summary set the stage for Thomas to get out ahead of the rest of the SCOTUS in setting forth the complicated 1st Amendment issues that the SCOTUS will, sooner or later, need to address. Thomas doesn't suggest any particular solution, but he does set forth and discuss some of the different possibilities for addressing the whole complex of constitutional questions that are posed by the role "digital platforms" now play in controlling and shaping the flow of information. I like that Thomas did this--as the senior justice on the SCOTUS he's assuming a leadership role, and I assume that his concurrence most likely reflects at least some input from other justices. Read it if you want to get some idea of the complexity of these issues--we all know there's a major problem here, but a bull in the china shop approach is not advisable. Here's Thomas' concluding paragraph, which returns to the irony he presented in his summary of the case:
