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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @03:25AM
Its ridiculous how wrong this submission is.
First, just because you say you aren't trolling, doesn't make it so.
Second the article isn't an honest presentation of the facts, it deliberately ignores the obvious problems with the argument and just hopes nobody will double check - a standard trolling tactic.
For example:
No, the ruling did not say the law applies to any form of identity. In fact, just the opposite - it lists a very specific set of characteristics that can not be a basis of discrimination:
Is being a nazi a "political affiliation?" Maybe. But being a nazi doesn't mean you get a free pass to harass or otherwise be a public nuisance, which is the basis for twitter et al kicking nazis and other assholes off their service. The local mall might have to let people demonstrate, but they do not have to tolerate those demonstrators harassing anyone else at the mall because they don't have to tolerate anyone who threatens other people at the mall. That's the very opposite of 'arbitrary.'
But leaving aside the legal issues here, the irony of these cases is that conservatives are falling victim to the very kinds of corporate power that are being fought by the “social justice” movements these men deplore. Here we have issues involving labor protections for employees (like James Damore) and the right of a company to restrict its users’ free speech. The leftist position is: because companies exercise private forms of power that affect people’s lives, they cannot be permitted to operate independently of public accountability. That’s why we need “economic democracy” and customers and employees need to have very clearly established legal rights. By contrast, the right’s general philosophical position on this tends to be: tough shit, you signed the contract, sucker.
It’s so funny to me watching people on the right complain that Twitter is stifling their free expression by suspending their accounts. After all, this concedes that the ability of companies to control speech can be pernicious in the same way that having governments control speech is. Everyone’s a leftist once a corporation tramples on them.