SCOTUS vacates lower court ruling that Trump's Twitter blocks violated 1A; Justice Thomas says he is wary of social platforms' “unprecedented” power over speech
The Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that found former President Trump violated the First Amendment …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes the loop on a case that ran through the courts for two years: a federal appeals court first held in 2019 that Trump's blocking of critics on Twitter violated the First Amendment, the DOJ asked the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling in August 2020, and the Court has now vacated it after Trump left office. The substantive news is Justice Thomas's concurrence — he uses the moot case to flag wariness of platforms' "unprecedented" power over speech, building on his earlier argument that Section 230's "sweeping protection" for platforms misreads the law.
First-order effects
- Trump's Twitter blocks no longer stand as a First Amendment violation — the vacatur wipes the lower court's ruling off the books without deciding whether public officials may block critics on social media.
Second-order effects
- Thomas's common-carrier framing hands state lawmakers and litigants a ready-made theory for regulating platform moderation, and it foreshadows the Court's later willingness to hear disputes over government contact with social platforms in the Biden administration misinformation case.
Third-order effects
- If a future majority adopts Thomas's view that platforms are "sufficiently akin" to common carriers, the legal foundation of Section 230-style editorial discretion erodes, and platform moderation becomes a regulated-utility question rather than a pure speech question.
The trend: The judiciary is moving from treating social platforms as private speakers toward testing whether their gatekeeping power over public speech should be regulated like common-carrier infrastructure.