Hacker News Reader

Here are some other antidiscrimination clauses in Federal law that read in a similar fashion:

From EEOC on employment: "race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information (including family medical history)." [1]

From FHA: "The Fair Housing Act prohibits this discrimination because of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability." [2]

Note that this act's (a) clause does not contain "sexual orientation" as above, and (b) specifically contains the new protected category of "political ideology".

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...

[2] https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/f...

So platforms can kick off LGBTQ+ folks, but not Nazis?

I'll give you a hint as to why they are doing this. There are already protections for race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, and disability.

This is all about getting "political ideology" added to the list so that they can publicly discuss their horrendous beliefs and not get fired

Yup. Everything else is window dressing. This is about forcing every private company to carry their propaganda whether they like it or not.

Political beliefs are already protected in California, where the companies that are most active in the surveillance economy are based.

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/harassment/political-reta...

That's for employment. This is about whether or not Twitter can ban Nazis.

Got it! If you want to punch someone, just declare them a nazi, right?

You realize that there is a difference between getting banned on Twitter and physical violence?

No, this is about whether Twitter can gather and trade personal information, explicitly excluding "information legally obtained from a publicly available source".

AFAICT the bill does nothing to limit who Twitter can ban based on publicly available information, including posts on Twitter itself.

Republicans are trying to pass laws to protect Literal nazis from being held accountable.

> why are Republicans proposing big new regulation that would apply to every US business, impose additional bookkeeping & accounting work for every business, and then not improve consumer privacy protection?

The answer is obvious with their historic agenda...

> discriminate against or make an economic opportunity unavailable on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, political ideology, or disability of a persons or class of persons.

They want, ironically, the anti-discrimination clauses. They want to prevent someone from discriminating in tech. That would (they hope) block the perceived anti-right bias, and maybe even prevent companies from blocking people like trump all together.

"Political ideology" really is the trojan horse here. Political ideology is not a protected class, whereas the others are.

This bill is really about banning content moderation. Everything else is window dressing.

Political ideology is not a protected class, whereas the others are.

That's clearly a mistake of history. Political affiliation or non-affiliation really needs to be protected at the same level as religious affiliation or non-affiliation.

> That's clearly a mistake of history. Political affiliation or non-affiliation really needs to be protected at the same level as religious affiliation or non-affiliation.

Gender and race are social constructs. But they have some form. Political ideology has zero form. This is either a move to render protected classes useless or turn every decision in America into a California-style well of litigation.

However PC was comparing it to religious affiliation, which in some senses is quite comparable.

In contrast with one of my sibling comments here, I agree with you. I think discriminating against people based on thoughts or beliefs is wrong, we should judge people based on their actions not their ideas. Minds can be changed and allowing a diversity of thought and discussion is ultimately a net benefit, even if some people end up being offended. Allowing discrimination based solely on ideas or words truly is a slippery slope.

I will gladly discriminate against Nazis, just as you would likely discriminate against folks whose personal creed included "user Dig1t belongs in a death camp."

It's okay to apply standards to public spaces. Not every ideology deserves to be heard.

I think most people would gladly discriminate against Nazis in their personal lives. When it comes to official/legal policies though, like say renting an apartment to someone, I think it becomes problematic to start saying it's okay to discriminate against people with particular beliefs or ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent to most people. There's a long list of reasons why allowing this kind of discrimination is a bad idea IMO, both idealogical and practical.

This proposed law (and this thread) is specifically about discrimination on private online platforms, not housing. Being kicked off of Twitter is nowhere near as life-threatening or disruptive to a person as getting kicked out of housing. The seriousness of the latter merits anti-discrimination laws, but the former is so frivolous that it's laughable that some people to feel entitled to use someone else's servers to spew their nonsense.

Twitter is a very public platform -- you said so yourself in your previous comment. If we're willing to force a religious baker to provide services for a group they find abhorrent (however misguided they are about that), why aren't we also willing to force a much more consequential service provider to provide services for a group they find abhorrent (however right or wrong they are about that)?

For the US baking case, the decided case law is that religious businesses are free to discriminate against gay people. Also, for religious places of employment, it is already a Constitutional right to fire priests for homosexuality, or to expel homosexual students from a religious school.

It is also religiously critical for religious institutions to be able to engage in religious discrimination; lest we ask whether we may have a Jewish pope lead the Catholic church.

We can discuss what ought to be all day, but I don't see the winds shifting anytime soon. We mind as well also discuss whether the world should be united, or... it would be a better expenditure of energy to discuss the oughts which we can actually do something about.

Side note. I still don't get why we're not making political ideology or belief a protected class.

Protecting people for retribution and discrimination based on their voting is already a thing, so why stop there?

What they're trying to do is make it so that private online platforms can't kick you off for your political ideology. This is an idiotic policy because it can and will be abused by extremists to violent ends at exorbitant cost to the platform. For example, if literal Nazis get kicked off the platform for organizing violent white power rallies, they would have standing to sue for discriminating against their political beliefs.

Only the large companies will be able to comply keeping a barrier to entry for any competition. Everyone loses but the wealthy oligopolists so it's perfectly aligned.

> Also: why are Republicans proposing big new regulation that would apply to every US business, impose additional bookkeeping & accounting work for every business, and then not improve consumer privacy protection?

Two potential reasons.

One: They believe federal privacy regulations are inevitable, and want to take the opportunity to shape it as much as they can. Two years ago there were competing Republican & Democrat proposals for privacy legislation; the meats were pretty similar to each other, and GDPR, and CCPA. The differences were some subtle details around the edges that are likely to end up being HUGELY impactful.

For example, the democrat proposal included a Right of Private Action while the republican proposal did not. You can blah blah blah all goddamn day about what counts as private and what doesn't. But at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is "what happens when a company breaks the law?" Being able to sue them yourself is a very large difference from requiring all enforcement run through the Attorney General or an executive branch whose funding can be rescinded.

Two, but related to the first: There are currently multiple states that have local privacy regulations. The number is likely to increase. Companies would prefer to deal with one set of laws rather than fifty even if the one set of laws is more difficult that any of the fifty laws it replaces.

On a related note, the other serious difference between democrat and republican proposals was called "pre-emption." The republic proposal would have removed the ability for states to pass stricter privacy laws at home.