So a bunch of Twitter users actually sued Trump for blocking them

You're blocked!
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Twitter users blocked by President Donald Trump weren't just threatening legal action if the president didn't unblock them on the social media platform -- they followed through.

The seven users through the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Trump for blocking them. They were cut from his feed because they criticized the president and his policies on the platform.

The federal lawsuit claims Trump's blocks essentially silences his opponents, infringing on their First Amendment rights and keeps them from interacting in a public forum. Along with Trump, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and White House social media director Dan Scavino are named in the suit.

First amendment lawyers wrote a letter to Trump and his social media and communications team last month demanding the president unblock the users. When that didn't happen, the lawsuit was filed in a New York district court.

In the suit, all seven users from across the U.S. claim they were blocked in the past few months for comments, replies, and other tweets criticizing or mocking the president on Twitter.

The group suing includes Rebecca Buckwalter, a writer and political consultant in D.C.; Philip Cohen in Maryland, who is a sociology professor at the University of Maryland; Holly Figueroa from Washington, who is a political organizer; Eugene Gu in Nashville, who is a surgery resident; Brandon Neely, a police officer in Texas; Joseph Papp in Pennsylvania, who is a former pro cyclist; and NYC-based Nicholas Pappas, who is a comic and writer.

To get a sense of what earned these users a block from the president, here are the offending tweets:

"The White House acts unlawfully when it excludes people from this forum simply because they’ve disagreed with the president," Knight Institute executive director Jameel Jaffer said in a release about the lawsuit.

Like the original letter, the suit asks for the White House to unblock the users and concede that restricting users based on their viewpoints is unconstitutional.

We've reached out to the White House for comment. A Twitter spokesperson said the company didn't have anything to say about the lawsuit.

Trump has 33.7 million Twitter followers. These seven weren't tweeting #MAGA, but that doesn't mean they can't be part of the conversation, they claimed.

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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