Trump can't block haters on Twitter, judge rules

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For most people, if your Twitter comments are being spammed with hate speech, you can simply block them.

But that's not true for one of the most powerful Twitter users, US President Donald Trump, as a judge ruled on Wednesday that he must keep the comments section in his Twitter feed completely open to the public.

Other government officials may have to follow the same rule on Twitter and all other social media platforms.

The judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald, said the accounts of officials are different from normal ones. They are "public forums" protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Trump's legal team, the US Department of Justice, said "we respectfully disagree with the court's decision and are considering our next steps," reported by Reuters.

The other party in the lawsuit were a couple of Twitter users and an institute at Columbia University, some of whom were blocked by Trump on Twitter.

The act of blocking a user was seen by the court as "a result of viewpoint discrimination."

You can block any Twitter user in the menu shown in the above picture, as long as you are not a US official. /Screenshot from Twitter

One of the users, Philip Cohen, said he was "delighted" with the ruling.

"This increases my faith in the system a little," he said.

Cohen called Trump a "corrupt incompetent authoritarian" before getting blocked by the US president.

Trump tweets a lot on his handle @RealDonaldTrump. He uses the service so often that even his supporters think he tweets too much.

But just like every other celebrity, he was bothered by haters criticizing him in the comments section under the tweets. And now he can't block them.

Fortunately there's still a way out. Twitter has a function called "mute" that can prevent Trump from seeing posts he doesn't like.

But there's no way to prevent the public from seeing them for now.