Donald Trump blocking accounts on Twitter 'violates US Constitution'
The president has repeatedly sought to avoid criticism by banning people from his account
- Andrew Griffin
- @_andrew_griffin
- Wednesday 7 June 2017 08:13 BST
Donald Trump has caught 500,000 veterans in one of his recent blocking sprees.
The president has taken to blocking his critics on Twitter, apparently in an attempt to stop them from making him look bad. And now VoteVets – a political group campaigning on behalf of veterans – has alllegedly been caught up in that block.
"The Commander in Chief can block @VoteVets, the voice of 500k military veterans and families, but we will NOT be silenced," the group posted on Twitter, alongside an image of the message that shows when an account has been blocked.
The left-leaning group drew support from across the political spectrum, from veterans as well as others. VoteVets focuses on progressive politics but represents hundreds of thousands of veterans who live across the US.
The group has been critical of Mr Trump's policies, including his "Muslim ban". Some of the posts criticising those policies have included Mr Trump's handle, meaning that it may potentially have shown up on his phone – which presumably led to the block.
The group is just the latest in a huge number of people who have been blocked by the president, in what appears to be a new social media strategy. After a range of people took to criticising him on Twitter – including by replying to his posts, so that they showed to everyone who looked at them – he appears to have decided to block them so that they can't see any of his posts or reply to them.
Free speech groups have argued that Mr Trump's new strategy might even contravene the US constitution, which guarantees that everyone have an equal voice. Lawsuits are currently ongoing to decide whether those blocks break the law.
