Scholarship@WashULaw

Free Speech and the Twitter Presidency

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

Publication Title

University of Illinois Law Review Online

Abstract

These are interesting and often terrifying times for our First Amendment values of free speech and free press. During the 2016 election, a major element of the Donald Trump campaign was scorn for the press and protesters. This was coupled with verbal, and even some physical, assaults by Trump supporters on members of the press — penned and terrified while covering campaign rallies. Trump the businessman had been highly litigious, including filing libel suits against his critics. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented extensively, Trump the candidate made hostility against the press a major feature of his campaign, calling them “dishonest,” “scum,” “sleaze,” and “horrible people.” He boasted at a Fort Worth rally in February 2016 that “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” At another rally in Kentucky, when heckled by protesters, he told the crowd to “get ‘em out of here,” whereupon the protesters alleged that they were assaulted by the crowd.

Keywords

First Amendment, Free Speech, Free Press, Press, Protesters, Trump

Publication Citation

Neil M. Richards, Free Speech and the Twitter Presidency, 2017 U. Ill. L. Rev. Online (2017)

Link

Share

COinS