ABSTRACT Since their inception, social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter have been legall... more ABSTRACT Since their inception, social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter have been legally considered private spaces that are not subject to the protections of the First Amendment. Rightly so, for (as many forget) the First Amendment applies to government actors, action, and public spaces, and the Internet is not one of those. However, in 2018, the Knight v. Trump ruling in favor of plaintiffs extended First Amendment protections via the public forum doctrine to those seeking access to (but who have been blocked from) participating in discussions on President Trump’s Twitter account. Numerous other similar cases across the country have found that public officials who use social media to communicate with constituents have established a designated public forum. They therefore cannot choose who is allowed into that space and who is not by blocking (disallowing access for) some members of the public, because this constitutes viewpoint discrimination. This decision is important in bringing forum doctrine into the technological age, and it opens important spaces for democratic deliberation. This article explains the specific requirements for a social media space to be considered a public forum from Knight v. Trump, describes related cases that are using it as a precedent, and explores the implications and unresolved issues related to this case.
As lines between public and private spaces online continue to blur, contracts are moving closer t... more As lines between public and private spaces online continue to blur, contracts are moving closer to the day when government actors will be involved in all of them. When 90%+ of online users do not read the terms-of-service (ToS) agreements of social media sites, they are unaware of possible repercussions of blindly assenting to these unread contracts, including potentially relinquishing a number of their constitutional rights. Primary among these is their First Amendment right to petition the government for relief in a court of law. In most ToSs, the online user must agree to mandatory arbitration in the site owner’s venue of choice. Secondary is their sole right to their intellectual property afforded by the Constitution. Through an online survey (N = 235), this article reports data concerning respondents’ attitudes toward reading ToSs, their demographic information, and their likelihood of accepting a forum-selection term from Twitter, contrary to their potential constitutional rig...
ABSTRACT Since their inception, social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter have been legall... more ABSTRACT Since their inception, social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter have been legally considered private spaces that are not subject to the protections of the First Amendment. Rightly so, for (as many forget) the First Amendment applies to government actors, action, and public spaces, and the Internet is not one of those. However, in 2018, the Knight v. Trump ruling in favor of plaintiffs extended First Amendment protections via the public forum doctrine to those seeking access to (but who have been blocked from) participating in discussions on President Trump’s Twitter account. Numerous other similar cases across the country have found that public officials who use social media to communicate with constituents have established a designated public forum. They therefore cannot choose who is allowed into that space and who is not by blocking (disallowing access for) some members of the public, because this constitutes viewpoint discrimination. This decision is important in bringing forum doctrine into the technological age, and it opens important spaces for democratic deliberation. This article explains the specific requirements for a social media space to be considered a public forum from Knight v. Trump, describes related cases that are using it as a precedent, and explores the implications and unresolved issues related to this case.
As lines between public and private spaces online continue to blur, contracts are moving closer t... more As lines between public and private spaces online continue to blur, contracts are moving closer to the day when government actors will be involved in all of them. When 90%+ of online users do not read the terms-of-service (ToS) agreements of social media sites, they are unaware of possible repercussions of blindly assenting to these unread contracts, including potentially relinquishing a number of their constitutional rights. Primary among these is their First Amendment right to petition the government for relief in a court of law. In most ToSs, the online user must agree to mandatory arbitration in the site owner’s venue of choice. Secondary is their sole right to their intellectual property afforded by the Constitution. Through an online survey (N = 235), this article reports data concerning respondents’ attitudes toward reading ToSs, their demographic information, and their likelihood of accepting a forum-selection term from Twitter, contrary to their potential constitutional rig...
The impetus for Obama’s “speech on race” during the 2008 campaign was a crisis involving media re... more The impetus for Obama’s “speech on race” during the 2008 campaign was a crisis involving media representations of Obama as unpatriotic along with the online publication of the Rev. Wright’s racially incendiary and anti-American sermons. Obama delivered an apologia designed to bolster Wright’s image so as to resurrect his own image while avoiding alienation of Black and White voters. A close reading reveals a novel rhetorical device, which employs an apologia for one individual nested within the apologia for the speaker. This device, “apologia by proxy,” is clearly distinguished from another form of political communication called apology by proxy. The article explains all strategies of image restoration used on behalf of Obama and Wright after Blaney & Benoit (2001).
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