George Santos Sued by a Blocked Twitter Follower in Free-Speech Claim

Airielle Lowe
·1 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- George Santos, the embattled Republican congressman charged with fraud, is being sued by a Montana man who claims his free-speech rights are being violated after he was blocked from posting comments on the New York lawmaker’s Twitter account.

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“The comment section of his Twitter account is a designated public forum within which defendant may not discriminate against speakers based on their viewpoint,” according to the federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Scott C. Smith, who lives in Montana, said in the lawsuit that Santos’s official Twitter page blocked him after he posted comments in May that were critical of the congressman’s political views. Smith is asking a judge to order Santos to unblock him and to pay unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

A similar suit was filed against Donald Trump when he was president and had blocked critics on his Twitter feed. That case was tossed by the US Supreme Court in 2021, when justices set aside a federal appeals court ruling that Trump had violated the First Amendment. But the High Court is set to hear a pair of cases next term exploring whether public officials violate the First Amendment when they block people on social media platforms.

“We are unaware of this lawsuit,” Gabrielle Lipsky, Santos’s director of communications, said in an email about the Smith complaint.

In May, Santos was charged with fraud and money laundering in New York. He has pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bond.

The case is Smith v. Santos, 23-cv-02002, US District Court for the District of Columbia.

(Updates with link to complaint, sentence on similar future Supreme Court cases)

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