Trump Twitter suit argued in federal court

My showing how I’m blocked by Trump on Twitter. Photo by Miesha Miller.

With updates.

Yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Department of Justice argued the lawsuit against President Trump and his staff for blocking us on Twitter, in which I’m a plaintiff.

After the two-hour hearing, just like in Law and Order, the news media met us with cameras and microphones as we came down the stairs of the courthouse, and I realized I hadn’t prepared what I would say. The first questions focused on a suggestion by the judge that Trump should just mute his critics on Trump instead of blocking us. Was this the solution? I hadn’t had time to consider it carefully, and we haven’t received any kind of settlement offer. So I said this:

Honestly I don’t know if muting is really the solution. But if all they really care about, which they say, is that he just doesn’t want to hear from us, then he would mute, but obviously he wants to suppress our speech. Obviously he doesn’t want us to be participating in the forum. He wants to look out at the world on Twitter, and see that everybody agrees with him and everybody thinks he’s great – and the fact is that’s not true – and that’s why he blocks us. He literally blocks us so that we won’t be seen to be expressing our views against him, and I think that’s outrageous and I’m glad that it’s apparently illegal.

Here are a few media links.

Columbia Journalism Review: In downtown New York, a First Amendment fight over Trump’s tweets

“I never thought he would block me. I tweeted at him all the time,” Cohen told CJR outside court. He’d just watched attorneys from the Knight First Amendment Institute tell a federal judge that in blocking Cohen because he didn’t like his tweet, the president had engaged in unconstitutional discrimination based on viewpoint. The Knight Institute, which is based at Columbia University, is representing Cohen and six other plaintiffs—a surgeon, a comic, a musician-activist, two writers, and a police officer—in a bid to qualify Trump’s Twitter as a public forum; part of a broader push to protect the First Amendment from a president who clearly does not respect it.

New York Times:  Judge Floats Idea to Settle @realDonaldTrump Twitter Blocking Case

A federal judge in Manhattan had plenty of questions for lawyers representing a group of Twitter users who sued President Trump in July after he blocked them on the social media service. And she had even more for the government.

The seven users, who had been blocked by the @realDonaldTrump account after criticizing the president, were joined in the lawsuit by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Their lawyers claimed that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed is an official government account and that blocking users from following it was a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Lawyers from the Department of Justice insisted that the Twitter feed was not, in fact, a public forum. Furthermore, they argued, no one had been meaningfully excluded from it.

Courthouse News, with the courthouse steps statements:

New York City Fox 5 news, with some followup interviews:

Agence France Press, published by Daily Mail: Twitter-blocked by Trump? Judge hears ‘free-speech’ case

Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, said he was summarily blocked in June 2017 after he reacted to a Trump tweet by replying with a photo of the president superimposed with the words “Corrupt Incompetent Authoritarian”.

“At first I was kind of proud, like ‘oh he cares about me,'” Cohen said.

“But then very quickly I realized that a lot fewer people were seeing my tweets and my political efficacy, my ability to speak to my fellow citizens, was impaired by that. And I think that’s not the way our government should act.”

New York: The Newest Frontier in Jurisprudence is Trump’s Twitter Feed

What’s private catharsis for the rest of us can be rightly seen as government retaliation when it’s a public official who goes on a blocking spree.

And a photo by Scott Matthews:

Photo by Scott Matthews.

These are just a few clips, mostly my scrap-booking for the day. I’ll write more later. Read all the case documents and statements, including those of the other plaintiffs, from the amazing Knight First Amendment Institute here.

Family Inequality year-end review

It’s been another year online. Here’s my report. Feel the excitement, because it’s 2017.

This year I only wrote 54 Family Inequality blog posts, down from 77 last year; the 2010-2016 average was 130 per year. On the plus side, despite a 30% decline in posts, I only had a 7% decline in visits to the blog. Thanks!

On the third hand, while the blog had a little less than 300,000 visits this year (down from a peak of 428,000 in 2015), my tweets had more than 25 million views in 2017, according to Twitter analytics. Yikes. The peak in Twitter hits was May, with 4.8 million views. President Trump blocked me on Twitter on June 6, and I haven’t hit more than 2 million views in a month since. Who among us a year ago could have predicted our current relationship to the president of the United States (and his truth-and-soul crushing army of minions)? Our lawsuit against the president and his staff proceeds; the latest news is posted here.

The big blog news for the year is actually offline, the publication of my new book, Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible. I selected the best of the 900 blog posts on here, then revised them, updated them, and combined and organized them. The result is eight chapters of surprisingly (to me) fresh essays. I’m super happy with it, and hope you (and maybe your students) are, too. Order an exam copy or buy it from University of California Press or Amazon.

So here are the top 10 blog posts written this year:

1. Prince Charles and Princess Diana height situation explained. I’ve been covering this issue since 2010, because someone has to. It finally got the attention it deserves with this, my most blockbuster tweet ever, so I wrote a post putting it all together. Yes, they really were the same height.

2. Demographic facts your students should know cold. This one led to lots of good discussion about teaching and learning demography in relation to other subjects, fake news, and so on.

3. More bad reporting on texting and driving, and new data. For years the New York Times has been publishing hysterical pieces about texting and driving, apparently in the service of selling Matt Richtel’s book. When David Leonhardt jumped with more nonsense in I updated my series. (Also, don’t text and drive.)

4. Sexual harassment: Et tu, Sociology? My colleague Liana Sayer and I made an offer. If you have first-hand knowledge of sexual harassment in sociology, tell us about it. We’ll collect information and report on it. Some people have contacted us. I hope more will. We’ll report back as we can.

5. Kids these days really know how to throw off a narrative on gender and families. What’s going on with young men’s gender views? Trying to tell the story as new data comes out (with code).

6. How I choose sides like it’s 1934. If I’m wrong — a false-positive read on the catastrophicness of the situation — that’s a better mistake to make than the false-negative mistake of not taking Trumpism and all this seriously enough until it’s too late.

7. Teaching Black family history in sociology, student resistance edition. A teachable moment about a teaching moment, about what happened to Black families during slavery, and how that relates to the present.

8. Race/ethnicity and slacking at work. Does new research show Black workers slack off more, and is working harder for the man really a sign of good character? Modern economics and a history lesson from Robin D. G. Kelley.

9. Marriage update: less divorce, and less sex. Married Americans are having less sex, and divorcing less. Go figure!

10. On artificially intelligent gaydar. My problems with that paper demonstrating a method of identifying sexual orientation from people’s profile pictures.

Hitting for the cycle in Trump land

While cautious about the risks the normalizing Trump, I have nevertheless attempt to engage a little with his followers on Twitter, which is the only place I usually meet people who are willing to support him openly. One exchange yesterday struck me as iconic so I thought I’d share it.

Maybe if I’d studied conversation or text analysis more I would be less amazed at how individuals acting alone manage to travel the same discursive paths with such regularity. In this case a Trump supporter appears to spontaneously recover this very common path over a short handful of tweets:

1. I don’t believe your facts
2. If they are true it’s no big deal
3. Obama was worse
4. Nothing matters everyone is corrupt

The replies got jumbled up so I use screenshots as well as links (you can start here if you want to try to follow it on Twitter).

Ivanka Trump tweeted something about how she was going to India. Since I’m blocked by Donald but not Ivanka, if it’s convenient I sometimes do my part by making a quick response to her tweets. I said, “Your representation of the US in India epitomizes the corruption and incompetence of this administration.”

The responses by @armandolbstd and @dreadGodshand are very typical, demanding “proof” about things that are obvious to basically informed people. I made the typical mistake of thinking we could talk about common facts, using the word “literally” a lot:

OK, so then I got sucked in with what I thought was the most obvious example of corruption, leading @dreadGodshand into the whole cycle:

Interesting how the “ok, maybe it’s true but so what” thing we hear constantly strikes him as suddenly a new question. And from there on through no-big-deal to Obama-was-worse to nothing-matters:

And he concluded, “I’m not hating obama for it. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s designed that way to help their parties. Who really cares?”

This reminds me of the remarkable shift in attitudes toward immoral conduct among White evangelicals, who used to think it was a very big deal if elected officials (Obama) did immoral things in private but now (Trump) shrug:

People do change. But I don’t put that much stock in changing people, and contrary to popular belief I don’t think that’s how you have to win elections. In the end defeating Trumpism politically means outvoting people who think like this, which will be the result of a combination of things: increasing turnout (one way or the other) among people who oppose him, decreasing turnout among people who support him, and changing the number of people in those two categories.

You might think this example just shows the futility of conversations like this, but maybe I’m missing some opportunity to get through. And it’s also possible that this kind of thing is demoralizing to Trump supporters, which could be good, too. So, live and learn.

Donald is not the biggest loser (among winning and losing names)

From 2015 to 2016 there was a 10% drop in U.S. boys given the name Donald at birth, from 690 to 621, plunging the name from 900th to 986th in the overall rankings. Here is the trend in Donalds born from 1880 to 2016, shown on a log scale, from the Social Security names database.

That 2016 drop is relatively big in percentage terms, but it’s been dropping an average of 6% per year since 1957 (it dropped 26% in the 8 years after the introduction of Donald Duck in 1934). I really wish it was a popular name so we could more easily see if the rise of Donald Trump is a factor in this. With so few new Donalds, and the name already trending downward, there’s no way to tell if Trump fanatics may be counterbalancing regular people turned off to the name.

Stability over change

How big is a fall of 69 births, which seems so trivial in relation to the 3.9 million children born last year? Among names with more than 5 births in each year, only 499 fell more, compared with 26,052 that fell less or rose. So Donald is definitely a loser.

But I am always amazed at how little change there is in most names from year to year. It sounds obvious to describe a trend as rising or falling, but names are scarily regular in their annual changes given that the statistics from one year to the next reflect independent decisions by separate people who overwhelmingly don’t know each other.

Here is away of visualizing the change in the number of babies given each name, from 2015 to 2016. There is one dot for each name. Those below the diagonal had a decrease in births, those above had an increase; the closer to the line the less change there was. (To adjust for the 1% drop in total births, these are shown as births per 1,000 total born.)

No name had a change of more than 1700 births this year (Logan dropped 1697, a drop of 13%; Adeline increased 1700, or 71%). There just isn’t much movement. I find that remarkable. (Among top names, James stands out this year: 14,773 born in 2015, rising by 3 to 14,776 in 2016.)

Here’s a look at the top right corner of that figure, just showing names with 3 per 1,000 or more births in either 2015 or 2016:

Note that most of these top names became less popular in 2016 (below the diagonal). That fits the long-term trend, well known by now, for names to become less popular over time, which means name diversity is increasing. I described that in the history chapter of my textbook, The Family; and going back to this old blog post from 2011. (This great piece by Tristan Bridges explores why there is more diversity among female names, as you can see by the fact that they are outnumbered among the top names shown here.)

Anyway, since I did it, here are the top 20 winners and losers, in numerical terms, in 2016. Wow, look at that catastrophic 21% drop in girls given the name Alexa (thanks, Amazon). I don’t know what’s up with Brandon and Blake. Your explanations will be as good as mine for these.

For the whole series of name posts on this blog, follow the names tag, including a bunch on the name Mary. 

---

Here’s the Stata code I used (not including the long-term Donald trend), including the figure and tables. The dataset is in a zip file at Social Security, here. There is a separate file for each year. The code below runs on the two latest files: yob2015.txt and yob2016.txt.

clear
import delimited [path]\yob2016.txt
sort v2 v1
rename v3 count16
save "[path]\n16.dta", replace
clear
import delimited [path]\yob2015.txt
sort v2 v1
rename v3 count15
merge 1:1 v2 v1 using [path]\n16.dta
drop _merge

gen pctchg = 100*(count16-count15)/count15
drop if pctchg==. /* drops cases that don't appear in both years (5+ names) */

gen countchg = count16-count15
rename v2 sex
rename v1 name

gsort -count16
gen rank16 = _n

gsort -count15
gen rank15 = _n

gsort -countchg
gen riserank=_n

gsort countchg
gen fallrank=_n

gen rankchg = rank15-rank16

format pctchg %9.1f 
format count15 count16 countchg %15.0fc

gen prop15 = (count15/3978497)*1000 /* these are births per 1000, based on NCHS birth report for 15 & 16 */
gen prop16 = (count16/3941109)*1000

*winners table
sort riserank
list sex name count15 count16 countchg pctchg rank15 rank16 rankchg in 1/20, sep(0)

*losers table
sort fallrank
list sex name count15 count16 countchg pctchg rank15 rank16 rankchg in 1/20, sep(0)

*figure for all names
twoway (scatter prop16 prop15 if sex=="M", mc(blue) m(Oh) mlw(vvthin)) (scatter prop16 prop15 if sex=="F" , m(Oh) mc(pink) mlw(vvthin))

*figure for top names
twoway (scatter prop16 prop15 if sex=="M" & (prop15>=3 | prop16>=3), ml(name) ms(i) mlabp(0)) (scatter prop16 prop15 if sex=="F" & (prop15>=3 | prop16>=3), ml(name) ms(i) mlabp(0))

See you in court, Mr. President (about that Twitter account blocking)

On June 7, I described how President Trump’s Twitter account blocked me, and the argument for why that violates the First Amendment. I can now report that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has filed a lawsuit on my behalf demanding that the President unblock us. The other plaintiffs are Trump-blocked Twitter users as well: Rebecca Buckwalter, Holly Figueroa, Eugene Gu, Brandon Neely, Joseph Papp, and Nicholas Pappas (the Knight Institute is also a plaintiff). The announcement is here.

This was the tweet I sent 15 minutes before discovering I was blocked by @realDonaldTrump:

Our argument is that the President created in his Twitter stream a “designated public forum,” and he can’t legally exclude people from that based on their political views.

Here’s my part of the story, as told to the Knight communications team:

I’m okay with the fact that the candidate I wanted lost the election. Our family was upset by the outcome, but I approached this like a civics lesson for the children: We told them that this is a democracy, and the next best thing to winning an election is using the democratic process to speak up. It is all of our responsibility to use the tools we have to engage in our democracy.

Social media are among the most effect tools I have to speak out. I have a blog and as a professor I publish academic writings, but Twitter gives me the broadest audience most immediately. For example, I’m delighted when I write a blog post that is read by a few thousand people. But because of my audience on Twitter, I can reach as many as 100,000 people with one of my tweets replying to the president. It’s true that there are some people who use the reply threads on Twitter just to trade insults, which may not be the most productive sort of conversation. But they also allow you to see a range of opinions of people who agree or disagree. Since I’m not a political commentator by profession, and I’m a parent, Twitter is the only way I can connect with that many people with just a few minutes of time every day (it helps that he and I seem to wake up at the same time in the morning so I can reply right away).

Being blocked by Trump diminished my ability to respond and engage in the political process. There has been measurable impact on my ability to be heard. Yes, I can still say what I want to say, but not to those I want to speak to, when I want to say it or in the way that means the most to me. It’s disempowering to be prohibited from speaking. And I’m troubled that the president can create a space on Twitter — where there are millions of people — that he can manipulate to give the impression that more people agree with him than actually do.

The complaint specifies:

Defendants’ blocking of Professor Cohen from the @realDonaldTrump account
prevents or impedes him from viewing the President’s tweets; from replying to these tweets; from viewing the comment threads associated with these tweets; and from participating in the comment threads.

If I complained about random citizens blocking me on Twitter, you could call me a whiner or a snowflake. But the President is not a random citizen, he is a public official — even, yes, my president — and complaining about him blocking me from his official public forum is not a personal beef, it’s a Constitutional obligation. That’s why we have a Constitution, and the court system to enforce it.

Here is the Knight Institute’s original letter demanding that he unblock his critics, sent prior to filing the suit. Attorney Alex Abdo has responded to some objections to their approach in this post. Here are the stories of the plaintiffs.

I’m happy to talk more about this, in coordination with the legal team. Wish us luck!

Trump blocked me on Twitter and that violates the Constitution

On Twitter, users have the option of blocking other users, which prevents them from viewing the blocker’s tweets, getting notified when they tweet, and participating in the comment thread below the blocker’s tweets. Apparently, Donald Trump’s Twitter account has started blocking people who criticize him. As of yesterday, I’m one of those people.

Yesterday, the Knight First Amendment Institute, a new outfit with a hefty endowment at Columbia University, sent a letter to the President outlining why this practice violates the First Amendment and demanding that he unblock users. You can read the letter here, but the gist of it is that the President’s account operates as a “designated public forum” for the federal govnernment and that suppressing speech on the basis of people’s political beliefs in that context is illegal. (See coverage here and here, and an argument against this logic here.)

Here is Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer explaining that Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States”:

Spicer: Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States.”

Noted. pic.twitter.com/5IWHoszfVt

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 6, 2017

My case illustrates how Trump created a public forum, used for official purposes, and then excluded me from participating in that forum on the basis of my political opinions.

When Trump was elected I made a case for “drawing a new line through the political landscape: for versus against Trumpism,” and oriented my political activity as a citizen accordingly. It turns out that the most efficient way I could get this message out was in the Trump threads on Twitter, by making simple memes stating opposition to Trump or mocking him. It’s not a sophisticated operation, but it didn’t take up very much of my time, and for the effort I think it had good results. (Maybe because my Twitter identity is “verified” or I have a relatively large number of followers, my tweets seemed to appear near the top of the thread if I posted them promptly.)

And I discovered that the Trump Twitter threads are a place to meet and argue with real people, strangers from other bubbles, about the most pressing issues of the day. Sure, most of the dialogue is pointless shouting and insults, which I am naturally way above, but not all of it, and for every person shouting there are many people reading along, who may be influenced by what they see. (For example, think of the young people living in Trump families described so well by Amy Harmon.)

My memes and statements were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, according to Twitter’s analytics, often appearing right below a Trump tweet. Clearly, this is not what the President wants, but just as clearly it is one small part of how democracy works these days. Here are a few examples of images I made and posted, or comments, with links for people who aren’t blocked so you can see them, screen images to avoid that (if you follow the links you can see the discussion in the threads).

From June 4:

From June 3:

From June 6:

From June 2:

From May 31:

From May 28:

From May 18:

From May 16:

From May 13:

From May 7:

You get the idea. Maybe putting up these memes feels like carrying a sign at a protest, but in this case it’s a political forum organized by the President and limited to those he selects based on their political statements. I don’t know how this legal argument will fare in the courts, if it gets there, but in this case as in so many others, his actions are bad for democracy.

Breaking: Trump has terrible judgment

Say what you want about his decrepit values, noxious personality, and authoritarian political views, but we should all be able to agree Trump has terrible judgment. Also that he doesn’t care about little people. And a lot of people who like him are deplorable.

This time, the story behind the story.

On Monday night Trump pulled himself away from MLK reverie long enough to notice that CNN was doing a show about his daughter, Ivanka. He saw someone praising her on Twitter and copied his message. He wrote:

The Daily News captured the original tweet, by Lawrence Goodstein (drgoodspine) revealing that Trump had lowercased “Great” and added a comma after it, but failed to notice that the good Dr. Goodstein got Ivanka’s Twitter handle wrong.

Hilarity ensued, and the story focused on how the real @Ivanka responded by telling him to pay attention to climate change.

I haven’t seen any media focus on Goodstein, apparently because he deleted his account right away. But I happened to notice it in time, and screen-grabbed a few tweets. The point of my showing them is: Trump has no idea what he’s doing or how it affects real (little) people, and doesn’t care anyway. Secondarily, the guy is awful and any reasonable public figure would want nothing to do with him – at least as he represented himself on Twitter – and certainly wouldn’t give him a platform of millions on Twitter. (I didn’t notice how many followers Goodstein had, but I remember thinking it wasn’t many.)

I didn’t save all of his tweets, but I got a few that I considered representative, because it was immediately apparent that a lot of what he did on Twitter was call people assholes, including President Obama, “Norm” Chomsky, and a lot of journalists, often by juxtaposing their face with a picture of an asshole. Take a look (click to view individual images):

 

Who cares? I don’t care about Goodstein. He claims to have spent a year treating 9/11 victims in New York, and for all I know he’s a good chiropractor. So he loves Trump – not surprising given what an unpleasant person he seems to be. The point is about Trump’s bad behavior. Some Trump fans live for a retweet from the great Tiny Hands. Maybe Goodstein did, too. But he apparently wasn’t really prepared for that big of a spotlight to shine on his nasty asshole-screaming habit (or maybe he was fine with it and it was a Trump goon squad that made him shut it down to prevent embarrassment – to Trump.)

And who shouts to millions of people without the slightest consideration of the context and content of what they’re shouting? Trump has had worse tweets, and done many much worse things, but his platform is actually still growing, and the power he has is increasing. He should not treat individuals like this. Before he turns someone’s life inside out, someone should check it out. Can the person handle it? Do they want to? Obama has had some wonderful moments with random citizens, but I don’t think they started with him landing Marine 1 on their lawn with the press pool and no advance people.

Finally, there are potential security implications, obviously, when a president acts so impulsively. One thing to notice is that Goodstein’s handle, @drgoodspine, was snapped up by someone, and they now have a potentially damaging platform as well, as Trump’s tweet is still out there.

Anyway, I just wrote this to help keep the record of bad judgment complete, seeing that no one was reporting it.