President Donald Trump is having a full-blown hissy fit after Twitter placed a fact check on two of his tweets alleging that voting by mail is rife with fraud and cheating.
After Twitter placed the notice on the two tweets Tuesday, Trump was up bright and early Wednesday morning, issuing empty threats against the social media platform:
Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
Problem is, there’s not any “big action” that the president or anyone else in government can take. They have no First Amendment right to use Twitter, as Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano noted:
“The president is right about the bias in social media and the president is also understandably not happy about his being fact checked. I mean, nobody would.
“But Twitter is privately owned and publicly held. It’s not owned by the government. And so the First Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of speech and of the press, since it only regulates the government, does not regulate Twitter. So stated differently, Twitter can take down, modify or correct any user it wants, including the president of the United States.”
And Napolitano added that it will be nearly impossible for Trump or the government to try and “regulate” Twitter or their rights as a platform:
“Look, I don’t like what they say. But I’ll defend to the death their right to say it. Under a Supreme Court decision that the president likes called Citizens United, Twitter has freedom of speech just like you and I and the president himself.”
No one has a right to post a sign on your lawn if you don’t want it there. The First Amendment also doesn’t give anyone the right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. If Donald Trump or his supporters are unhappy with Twitter’s terms of service, they should delete their accounts and start their own social media platform. Otherwise, they should shut the hell up and stop whining like a spoiled two-year-old.
Featured Image Via Fox News