Twitter’s action against Trump opens a can of First Amendment worms

Ironies abound in the debate over free speech, now that Twitter has taken away President Donald Trump’s favorite bullhorn.

“We are living Orwell’s 1984,” his son Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in his dad’s defense on his own Twitter account. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.”

Oh, it’s not that bad. Junior’s Twitter remained alive and well, even as his dad’s accounts were banned or suspended from a half-dozen other major platforms.

Yet I couldn’t help but contrast the Trump camp’s indignation over his deplatforming with their outrage two years ago after an appeals court ruled that he could not block users from his Twitter account.

The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that “overwhelming” evidence of the official nature of the account made it a public forum like a soapbox speech in a town square.

Therefore, “once the president has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants,” Judge Barrington Parker wrote for the court, “he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.”

In other words, the First Amendment protects our rights as individuals from being muzzled unfairly by government, not the other way around. Now, ironically, he finds himself on the outside of the Twitterverse, wishing to get back in.

Unlike the rest of us, the president cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, the court ruled. Press freedom and Twitter content freedom work both ways, protecting government officials but also access to them by those whom they govern.

Yet, as much as Trump has clutched his Twitter as affectionately as a big bucket of KFC chicken, he can hardly claim to have been silenced. The master of publicity needs only to pick up his phone, as he often has, and call a news conference or cut into a live Fox News broadcast, among other media.

He’s already considering starting his own social media platform, according to reports. That, too, would be his right. But I also wonder how that might affect his recently espoused opposition to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which with certain exception protects the Big Tech companies from lawsuits for publishing content that a third-party source provides.

Trump, among others from both parties, began preaching opposition to Section 230 after deciding the tech companies were getting too big and, in Trump’s view, too liberal, for their breeches.

As the law has helped internet companies flourish, Section 230 also has protected fringe sites known for hosting hate speech and other objectionable content.

Trump and many others on the political right also see reining in Section 230 as a way to stop what they see as Big Tech discrimination against the right. One of them is Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who was infuriated last week over a slightly different situation: Simon & Schuster’s cancellation of its plans to publish his new book, coincidentally titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech.”

“A direct assault on the First Amendment,” Hawley said in a tweet to “the woke mob” at Simon & Schuster.

“This could not be more Orwellian,” Hawley said, giving another boost, like Don Jr. did, to the late George Orwell’s book sales. “Let me be clear, this is not just a contract dispute. It’s a direct assault on the First Amendment. ... I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have. We’ll see you in court.”

Fine. That would be his right. But his book deal does not sound like a First Amendment issue. Simon & Schuster said they had canceled the book contract in light of Hawley’s effort to challenge states’ electors during the joint session of Congress that was interrupted by deadly violence.

I understand his disappointment, but as Twitter’s Trump ban shows, the First Amendment is limited to government action, not publishers and website owners.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)