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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the dangerous-precedent dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The social media giant may be guilty of violating of California law regarding discriminating against a political class, and being deceptive to their customer base. Twitter, by discriminating against people on the right, has exposed itself to a potential cascade of legal liability—including a potential class action suit.

Despite being from dangerous.com, this is not an attempted troll. The author gives a quite interesting analysis of Twitter's potential legal issues in censoring political speech in California.

Source: https://www.dangerous.com/40574/arroz-strong-case-twitter-censorship-violates-californias-civil-rights-laws/


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 26 2018, @04:59AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday January 26 2018, @04:59AM (#628104) Journal

    Well, TFA overstates its case, but in this case you'd lose your "wager." California law is rather unique in this regard in that it grants an affirmative right to free speech, which has been held to apply to private entities in certain circumstances.

    The California constitutional provision perhaps most famously was held in the Pruneyard decision to force private shopping malls to allow solicitation from private individuals on free speech grounds. SCOTUS later upheld this decision even though SCOTUS had previously held that federal law can't force private shopping malls to allow free speech -- but SCOTUS recognized that California's affirmative right to free speech was much stronger than federal Constitutional rights.

    Many states and foreign countries have subsequently disagreed with the breadth of California law as outlined in the Pruneyard decision. And California itself has pruned (ha!) some of that decision over the years, which is why TFA overstates its case. But the gist is that California law has at least in theory broad provisions for considering what privately owned spaces count as "public forums" where free speech rights must be respected. So far, such law has not been applied to "virtual" forums like social media, but given the ubiquity of things like Twitter, there is a valid legal argument to be made on the basis of CA precedent.

    On the other hand, as I noted, California courts have been narrowing this right over the past few decades, so it's not at all clear that they would want to grant this kind of expansion.

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