Our long national nightmare is over.
Best mugshot ever
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will no longer block users from his personal account for expressing “First Amendment-protected viewpoints” as part of an agreement to end a lawsuit where plaintiffs say they were unconstitutionally blocked for criticizing him or his policies on the platform, according to a filing late Friday in a federal court in Austin.
Paxton had already unblocked the named plaintiffs of the lawsuit in May, a month after the lawsuit was filed, but the latest filing confirmed he has now unblocked any other accounts. The ACLU of Texas, a freedom of speech organization that represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University called the agreement “an important victory for Texans’ First Amendment rights.”
“We’re pleased that Attorney General Paxton has agreed to stop blocking people from his Twitter account simply because he doesn’t like what they have to say,” Katie Fallow, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a prepared statement. “Multiple courts have recognized that government officials who use their social media accounts for official purposes violate the First Amendment if they block people from those accounts on the basis of viewpoint. What Paxton was doing was unconstitutional.”
See here and here for the background. Statements from the ACLU of Texas and Knight First Amendment Institute have the remaining details. Paxton had already agreed to unblock the nine plaintiffs, and the law was clearly against him, so this was the only way out for him that didn’t involve getting slam-dunked by a federal judge. It’s a molehill in the grand scheme of things, but nowadays we should celebrate any time the rules are made to apply to schmucks like Paxton.