First Amendment Lawyer Dismisses Trump’s Claim That Twitter Is Stifling Free Speech: He Doesn’t Want Critics to ‘Have a Chance to Respond’
Well-known First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams dismissed President Donald Trump’s angry assertion that Twitter was “completely stifling” free speech by adding a misinformation warning label to two of his inaccurate tweets about mail-in voting.
Speaking with SiriusXM host and ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams, the attorney who famously argued the Pentagon Papers case said Trump had no real argument that his First Amendment rights were somehow being violated by the social media platform. As Abrams noted, Trump’ ability to post whatever he wants has not been affected in any way.
“What he’s really saying is not that they’re limiting his speech, he can say anything he wants and not even that they’re taking him off [the site],” the free speech advocate explained. “So, what he’s saying, and he’s really very clear about it, is not that it violates him by keeping him from speaking. He’s saying he wants to speak in a way where the other side, or critics of his, or people who are saying what he’s saying is just false, will not have a chance to respond.”
The elder Abrams — Floyd is Dan’s father — did question Twitter’s logic, however, in its selective application of actively fact-checking Trump. Specifically, Abrams called out Twitter for targeting two of Trump’s tweets that included false claims but also absurd yet nonetheless factually irrefutable predictions about mail-in voting. Notably, Abrams pointed to Trump’s recent Twitter campaign spreading a vicious conspiracy theory about MSNBC host and political foil, Joe Scarborough.
“It is sort of an odd choice,” Abrams agreed when asked about the social media platform’s decision. “Some of what the president was saying was sort of a prediction as to the future. And predictions aren’t facts anyway, right?”
“That to me is very different where you have a situation where, by a series of accusations, carefully phrased, maybe for legal reasons, buy carefully phrased to be statements of suspicion and calling for investigation, but in a context where there is, literally, literally no basis at all for an investigation and is obviously an effort to pay back Joe Scarborough and which does real harm to the [Lori Klausutis] family.”
“That comes a lot closer to Twitter’s own guidelines about avoiding harassment,” Abrams pointed out. “That does sound very far down the road, to me at least, of harassing Joe Scarborough at the same time it is inflicting predictable and terrible pain on the family of this dead woman.”
Listen to the audio above, via SiriusXM Channel POTUS 124.
