No. The White House Press Office does not need a twitter account. They can issue press releases and hold press conferences, and both will be widely covered by the national media or view on the internet. There is no reason they need to use twitter.
When the internet has a publicly owned space that no private entity controls, you get to make that argument. Until then, platforms like Twitter are the next best thing we have to a public square (and in fact really the ONLY online public square), and that means that when our public political figures speak their voices must be made heard.
Arguing otherwise simply justifies using the rules as a sledgehammer to silence voices you don't like. The WH Press Secretary is a very, very loud voice that should be listened to whether you like it or not. She said nothing mean, nothing cruel, nothing divisive or illegal or inciting violence, she linked to a news story by the 4th largest publication in the US. This is about as vanilla as you can get and it is completely unjustifiable to block her account just for that.
==The WH Press Secretary is a very, very loud voice that should be listened to whether you like it or not.==
This sounds pretty authoritarian. I can think of plenty of times this wouldn’t be true. What if she directly invited violence or knowingly spread foreign propaganda?
How exactly is it authoritarian to say that the press secretary for the president of the United States shouldn't have their means of communications, on what's become essentially a public commons, rate limited by a corporation? The problem with your argument, and frankly more than half of the arguments in this clusterfuck of a comment thread, is that if we want to go that way we have to argue in favor of corporate sovereignty given the power these companies have. That's gross to me, for probably a dozen or so reasons.
Because nobody should be above the rules they agree to before using. You are arguing for political immunity based on holding a job that is neither elected nor approved by elected officials. That is authoritarian, whether or not you find it “gross”.
Your desires to insult those who disagree with you and fast forward to some “corporate sovereignty” fantasy aren’t relevant to the discussion of whether this action broke the terms Twitter has laid out.
==if we want to go that way we have to argue in favor of corporate sovereignty given the power these companies have.==
Or, we just allow them to manage their users, user agreements, and platform like we do other businesses. Your argument is to take that power away from companies and give it to government.
Then you probably want to know that your public servants are doing that, don't you? Rather than not know at all? Authoritarian would be you're not allowed to know at all. I'm pretty sure we tried that sometime in history, oh that just rings a bell... and it didn't work out so well then.
Or didn't you realize that this insanity cuts both ways?
One of thousands of places online that the white house fully controls, where the press secretary can say whatever she wants, accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
For some private individuals a twitter ban, coupled with bans from a dozen other internet hubs, might be a difficult hurdle to overcome, as starting a new site and then getting traffic to it is difficult due to network effects. But to claim that public officials have no means of having their voices heard besides twitter is patently absurd.
Are you aware of the term "public easement"? In many jurisdictions you are not able to block public access to your "private property" once the public gets accustomed to accessing that property. Same thing should apply here. You don't get to just open your private property for everyone to use and then close it for people you don't like politically many years later.
Section 203 made them a public square because unlike the private property who would be liable for whats done on that land twitter gets a pass. And its looking more and more like they shouldn't. And if that happens twitter wont exist.
Of course it should. Not only practically because twitter shouldn't be monitoring the government that polices it, but also cause if that government lets say strips twitter protections it would be dumb of twitter to have done.