The U.S Supreme court had on Monday, refused to hear a challenge by Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, on free speech grounds of a judge’s order that prohibited the company from telling Donald Trump about a prosecutor’s confiscation of direct messages and other data associated with the former president’s Twitter account.
The justices dismissed the company’s appeal of the U.S. District Judge, Beryl Howell’s order that banned it from telling Trump about the warrant from Special Counsel Jack Smith and required the handover of information without the judge first hearing X’s objections.
X had called the order an infringement of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which limits the government’s ability to restrict speech.
Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X in 2023. That same year, Smith obtained a warrant in for information associated with Trump’s account – “@realDonaldTrump” – on the platform, dating back to when it was still called Twitter, as part of his criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to repudiate his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. This investigation eventually led to criminal charges being filed against Trump, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Trump is currently vying for the presidential seat under the Republican party in the Nov. 5 US election.
While Trump’s Twitter posts can be publicly viewed, X also holds non-public information on accounts like direct messages, drafts of social media posts, location data and the type of device used to share posts.
It is still not clear whether Smith’s prosecution of Trump had relied on the information gleaned from the Twitter account but in Smith’s August 2023 indictment, Trump was charged with conspiring to defraud the United States, illegally obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so, and conspiring against the right of Americans to vote.
In January 2023, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell approved Smith’s appeal for a search warrant ordering X to produce records related to Trump’s Twitter account.
The Washington-based judge also barred X from informing the former president about the warrant, with the judge being quoted to have said that he found “reasonable grounds to believe that disclosing the warrant to Trump would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, (or) notify confederates.”
X’s lawyers has argued that the nondisclosure order contravened the company’s right to communicate with Trump, its subscriber, citing the First Amendment protections.
The social media platform, still called Twitter at the time, had suspended Trump’s account in January 2021 – citing the risk of further incitement of violence following the besiegement of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters – but reversed its position under Musk, who called himself a “free speech absolutist.”
Currently, Musk is endorsing Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Trump has announced that if elected, he would establish a government efficiency commission headed by Musk.
