Tag: Dan Scavino

“It’s definitely an organic process,” CarpeDonktum told me over the phone shortly after Mr. Trump tweeted his video. “If a political campaign wanted to hire me to do viral marketing stuff for them, that could be interesting,” he mused. CarpeDonktum started making memes, like countless other online Trump supporters, after spending time on Reddit’s The_Donald forum. According to their creator, it’s no fluke that the videos caught the eye of the president; he tailors them to an older generation of internet users. “It’s boomer humor,” he said of his style of videos. And CarpeDonktum, who described himself as “an entertainer” who “wants to make people laugh,” is not above engaging in all-caps Trumpian politics (which includes angrily tweeting at liberal politicians). But at a time when our politics is programmed by what’s viral on Twitter, CarpeDonktum appears — stupefyingly as it might seem — to have something approaching power in MAGAland. “All of the memes and stuff like that.” he said. The stuff online that people dismiss as memes — that’s the way to motivate people,” he added. “It’s the viral political marketing of the future.” In theory, his story is a perfect realization of the utopian understanding of the utopian promise of the internet: a truly democratic system of communication where anyone, anywhere can create things and get them seen by important people — even the president!

President Donald Trump can't block Twitter users because of their political opinions without violating the First Amendment, a New York federal judge has ruled. They claimed the president uses Twitter as a public forum to share official information in his capacity as president and therefore was violating their right to petition the government by blocking them. The Department of Justice, in a motion for summary judgment filed in October, challenged plaintiffs' standing to sue and argued his use of the social media platform isn't regulated by the First Amendment. In a 75-page order issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald found that Twitter is indeed a designated public forum and "viewpoint-based exclusion" of the plaintiffs from that forum violates the First Amendment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former communications director Hope Hicks are dismissed as defendants in the suit, but social media director Daniel Scavino remains a defendant because he routinely accesses Trump's Twitter account. While this lawsuit targets Trump's behavior, Buchwald's ruling extends to all public officials — and could likely spark a wave of similar litigation against other block-happy government employees. "The answer to both questions is no." Buchwald held that the @realDonaldTrump account meets the Supreme Court's standards for a designated public forum and barring participation based on political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination and "no government official — including the President — is above the law." She notes that not only does Trump tweet about his policies, agenda and other government business from that account but he also sometimes makes official announcements from it before they're announced to the public through more traditional channels. Her analysis highlights the conversational nature of Twitter as a platform, and notes that Trump would have been better off muting the users whose opinions he'd rather not read because blocking them restricts their ability to speak by limiting their ability to reply to his tweets.