Comment by ezrast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezrast | Hacker News Reader

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Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association. Consumers should have options, of course, but we get that through good old monopoly-busting (the situation is different for physically-entrenched monopolies like ISP's, but none of your listed industries are that).

Aside from maybe payment processing, you're also drastically overstating how limited the options in these spaces are. There are literally hundreds of domain registrars. Hosting providers are also plentiful and you can always colo. Facebook and Twitter are not infrastructure. Uber and Lyft are not known for their business services in any case.

Capricious bans do happen, but if someone somehow manages to get blacklisted from all of AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean, odds are pretty good that that's society working as intended. It's nearly impossible to convince that many businesses not to take your money without actually being a terrible person who doesn't deserve to have your views publicized.

> Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association.

This justifies 80% of McCarthyism. Are you comfortable with this implication?

If by "justifies" you mean "doesn't explicitly outlaw" then yeah, I am, because libel laws also exist.

Is it your position that the real problem with McCarthyism was that actual communist spies were being denied jobs and service? I don't know how else you could be drawing the connection to what you quoted.

There's no legal burden of proof requirement for firing somebody for suspicion of belonging to a non-protected class.

American libel laws also require that, to convict someone of libel, you need to affirmatively prove that the defendant's claims are untrue, particularly if the victim is a public figure.

The real problem with McCarthyism is that even actions by non-governmental entities to enforce social norms against genuinely totalitarian ideologies by means that fall within the bounds of the law can still be unjust if they are pursued to extremes.

> American libel laws also require that, to convict someone of libel, you need to affirmatively prove that the defendant's claims are untrue

That's true, but potentially misleading: under the civil standard of proof (“preponderance of the evidence”), all the burden of proof means is that you are obligated to provide some evidence from which that conclusion could be drawn.

> particularly if the victim is a public figure.

No, while there are other things that must be proven when the plaintiff is a public figure or the issue is one of public concern, the degree of responsibility or required proof on the falsity element of libel doesn't change. (What does change, specifically, is about the publisher’s mental state; while for libel more generally mere negligent misreprentation will suffice for libel, for issues of public concern actual malice is required.)

I don't know why you're bringing burden of proof into it. Of course people get fired for unjust reasons all the time. If those reasons are petty prejudices that have existed for the duration of humankind's existence, and that the best efforts of societal and political leaders have failed to stamp out, we use the sledgehammer of protected classes to try and limit the damage.

If the reasons have more to do with a massive, nation-wide disinformation campaign instigated by powerful political figures, those are some very particular problems that are not best fixed by putting additional shackles on those pesky private businesses.

"<thing> can be unjust if pursued to extremes" is not a provocative or substantive comment for any value of <thing>. But before I go on, let me seek clarification: for the purposes of this discussion, are you actually suggesting that political affiliation should be made a protected class? That seems like where this is going but I don't want to accidentally end up fighting a straw person.

My argument is that private entities should be pressured to exercise their freedom of association responsibly and fairly, even when failure to do so falls below the legal standards of non-discrimination.

I agree that legal "sledgehammers" and "shackles" are burdensome. It's because of my eagerness to avoid such remedies that I strongly advocate other measures to discourage private firms from abusing their market power to effect political change by selectively including or excluding potential customers and employees for political reasons. While I suppose I technically agree that "private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association", they should be under pressure to use extreme discretion in exercising that freedom.

Okay, that's generally reasonable, but in the context of the current US political climate I think you're concerned about the wrong thing. While the national situation is frequently described as being rife with political intolerance, those attitudes belong mostly to the masses and to politicians. The megacorporations in question skew heavily techno-libertarian and display little propensity for censoring their platforms beyond removing illegal content and porn. In the case of social media in particular, it's the major platforms' lack of interest in curating political content that has allowed them and their "unbiased" algorithms to become the unwitting tools of those who would undermine our political institutions. If the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit would choose some principles to stand for rather than trying to be everything to everyone, they and we would be less susceptible to that sort of manipulation.

Social media is a whole other can of worms.

What do you consider “undermining our political institutions”? If that consists of spreading disinformation and propaganda, those have been part of politics for as long as there have been politics. If it’s because the propaganda is inserted by witting or unwitting agents of a hostile foreign power—well, that was the rationale for blacklisting suspected Communist screenwriters. This wasn’t the angle I was coming from, but it does circle back to that somehow.

"If [an entity] somehow manages to get blacklisted from [every major player in a given industry], odds are pretty good that's society working as intended."

I can see the logic behind your statement, but I think it is easier than you are asserting for zeitgeist to start a ball rolling that cannot be easily stopped in terms of pushing people/actors/organizations out of society for being on the "wrong side."

Do you have any examples in mind?

I am not invoking Godwin, but I happen to be reading a very interesting book on WWII that focuses largely on the industrial/logistical effort of the main actors. The coverage of Germany's industrial sectors, particularly the aeronautics companies like Messerschmitt, Junkers, etc. is a pretty good example. Looking deeper (read: other sources) shows a world where the political lean of the Order of the Day had massive influence on what products got made, which ideas were given attention and funding, and which people were either supported or blackballed. In 1930s Germany, the engineers and firms that maintained the proper signalling, or political tone, were given a wide berth in deciding what was relevant and irrelevant with little or no consideration for what worked and what did not. This is what sprang to mind when I read your comment.

> Political philosophy is not a protected status

It's not federally protected; state laws vary.

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