Can Twitter Legally Bar Trump? The First Amendment Says Yes

When Simon & Schuster canceled its plans this week to publish Senator Josh Hawley’s book, he called the action “a direct assault on the First Amendment.” And when Twitter permanently banned President Trump’s account, his family and his supporters said similar things. “We are living Orwell’s 1984,” Donald Trump Jr. said — on Twitter. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.” The companies’ decisions may have been unwise, scholars who study the First Amendment said, but they were perfectly lawful. That is because the First Amendment prohibits government censorship and does not apply to decisions made by private businesses. It is certainly possible to violate the values embodied in the First Amendment without violating the First Amendment itself. But the basic legal question could hardly be more straightforward, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. And, she said, it should not have been lost on Mr. Hawley, who graduated from Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.