“Radical” ruling lets Texas ban social media moderation based on “viewpoint” | Hacker News Reader

“Radical” ruling lets Texas ban social media moderation based on “viewpoint”

arstechnica.com

21 pointsAdmiralAsshat18 comments

Maybe social media companies can declare themselves "religious businesses" and bypass this new regulation since just last year, this happened in Texas:

> Federal judge in Texas rules in favor of religious businesses over LGBTQ discrimination claims

> A federal judge ruled Sunday that for-profit businesses that have sincerely held religious beliefs do not have to abide by LGBTQ discrimination claims, a blow to the previous ruling in the Supreme Court that protected sexual orientation and gender identity from discrimination, according to The Dallas Morning News.

https://thehill.com/legal/579816-federal-judge-in-texas-rule...

YouTube got some people pretty hot and bothered when they demonetized some LGBT content because of advertiser preferences. I'm curious to see how that one plays out under this law...

Can't wait to see how this is applied on "Truth Social".

Doesn't look like it applies, the law says that social media sites with the most users are common carriers.

Like the article mentions how would they even enforce it though? It's a state law so it would only be enforceable on companies based in Texas or possibly content hosted in Texas and they can't demand information about or regulate users outside of Texas. This will just result in social media companies requiring people from Texas to verify their identities to use their platforms in Texas which I'm sure will go over great with voters in Texas.

I have no clue how they'd even hope to enforce it. But if somebody tried to sue Truth over it, they'd almost certainly point to their negligible market penetration as a reason they aren't a common carrier.

If this law gets passed it will backfire spectacularly.

This was an inevitability of the right-wing "cancel culture" narrative. If you want to keep people from being fired for being bigots, but you want to protect the right to fire people for any reason at any time, there's nothing you can do other than to make "bigot" a protected class.

I'm waiting for people to self-identify as bigots, or for it to be a choice on the census under race or religion.

You need to be able to teach the other side of the Holocaust somewhere in a free country, right?

are you being serious?

No. Thank you for asking. Recall [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/19/texas-...] reported by other outlets too if the Guardian isn’t to your taste.

Social media moderators really brought this on themselves.

It seems to me to be a strange stance by conservatives. On the one hand they think a business ought to be able to not serve certain protected classes and on the other hand want to be treated like a protected class.

An outgroup which laws which bind but do not protect and an in group which the law protects but does not bind.

Seems totally illogical doesn't it? Which explains why it makes perfect sense to conservatives.

Not all conservatives are libertarians.

When talking about a movement with a large number of people one has to generalize a bit. It’s ok to say members of X are Y even when there exists at least one counter example.

Well, even the claim that most US conservatives are libertarians is kinda dubious. Broadly, conservatism in the US has three branches: social conservatives, libertarians, and foreign policy hawks. Their common distaste for communism made allies.

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