no one is saying it’s illegal. they’re disagreeing with the policy. just like many would cry if fb banned lgbt content even thought it would be legal

So what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? This is not a good precedent.

The grocery store reserves the right to refuse service to whomever they want, so long as they are not a protected class.

Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?

Maybe it's cause I'm european, but if it were up to me: yes, in a heartbeat. The closer to (local) monopoly a company comes, the more it advertises itself as a universal provider, the less choice it should have in its customers. The easiest way to do this would be a radical expansion of the notion of protected class to cover at the least exercise of any fundamental right (such as speech).

To be explicit since for some reason people here are afraid to come out and say this: yes, I want to take that freedom away from American businesses and I would if I could. (I'd take it away from European businesses too.) That's what a law is - that's what every law is.

In the U.S. at least, grocery stores are not monopolies. Neither is Facebook.

Both have competitors who can supply fungible services to the market, some of which are typically very close, sometimes "just a click away".

Agree with grocery stores, disagree with Facebook. It should be fungible, ie. required by law to expose APIs for interoperability with other social networks, but it isn't. Imagine if you needed a separate credit card per store you visited.

Before Visa and Mastercard became widespread, it was common for some stores to only accept their own proprietary charge cards. Even today, stores aren't legally required to accept particular cards. Some don't take American Express or Discover. Others only accept cash.

Right but cash is this for stores. If there's a special kind of cash that's only accepted at one store, I don't know if that's legal but I feel it either isn't or at least shouldn't be.

Some freedom, yes. It's not 0% or 100%.

I'm sure there is already something that is illegal for companies to do or say or censor.

Why not adding one more thing which is fake news?

It's a possible idea that doesn't sound far-fetched.

If Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A announce tomorrow morning that they are refusing service to all people who voted for a Democratic candidate in the last few election cycles (something that's within the realm of plausibility), what would be your initial reaction?

I already specifically avoid both companies, so go nuts.

>Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?

>You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?

Yes, I absolutely am. I am proposing that we legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class, as has been the common custom in the US until very recently. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected in all venues, both public and private. Infringing on corporate personhood is a small price to pay for a free and open society.

Edit: (comment thread is too deep and not able to reply directly)

The recent trend of trying to silence political opponents represents an existential threat to our democracy. I'm really baffled how others in this thread are not able to see why that is. Nowhere in this discussion have I claimed to be persecuted, or have I even established what my political leanings are.

Political ideology is a choice, and as such, not protected by the civil rights act of 1964.

You can wish you were a victim of persecution for your political choice, but it is still your choice, and as such, people can also choose to not employ or serve you for your decision.

Terrible reasoning. Parental or marital status are also choices but are protected classes.

No, by that reason they should not be protected classes, as race, sex, sexual orientation, etc should be. Same with religion.

Also, why did you just create a throwaway just to make that comment?

Opinions and ideology might be mutable but they are not a choice. You get convinced into them, this is not something that you can just choose.

Anyway, I would argue that simply protecting immutable characteristics without also protecting certain actions does not make sense. For example it makes no sense to protect sexual orientation but not the action of holding your partner's hand in public or publically saying that you are of a certain orientation - after all your employer/person that you are doing business with would likely not know your sexual orientation without doing either of the above actions.

Ironically, political activities or affiliations is a protected class in California.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...

That's what genuine, old school liberalism looks like, kids.

IIRC there is no case law on this, though if you know of any I'd appreciate sharing it.

> legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class

“Political ideology” is infinitely extensible. To enshrine it as a protected class removed all meaning from the latter.

> as has been the common custom in the US until very recently

The Revolutionary War was a political question. How were Loyalists treated? Following that, how did Federalists and Jeffersonians interact in the social sphere? More recently, how did the labour union debate get peacefully resolved? Or American participation in WWI get non-violently debated?

My initial reaction - I've been trying to get all my Democratic-voting friends to stop paying money to Chick-fil-A. If they want to do it for me, great.

Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.

Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.

> what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car?

The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them.

Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value.

It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.

Nothing is stopping them from doing that. “Political ideology” is not a protected class.

Except in California, though I think it's party rather than ideology.

Nothing, and that's a good thing, because now that wearing masks is a partisan political issue, grocery stores should feel entirely within their rights to ban people who refuse to wear masks even if they claim political grounds, and they should not be forced by the government to let people in.

In America, the default is that private businesses, even those who provide a service to the public, get to choose who they engage in business with and how, with no interference from the government. There are very narrow exceptions (Civil Rights Act, ADA, antitrust, etc.) when absolutely necessary.

The first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable. We need better protection for free speech that applies to corporate platforms (or perhaps to just apply the same common carrier rules we apply to the phone system to other platforms).

> first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable

The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3].

Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...

The East India Trading Company preceded the writing of the First Amendment by some distance, and that company for some period accounted for fully 1/2 of all global trade.

Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.

Not true. The Dutch West Indies Corporation, one of the largest in history, existed before and during the ratification of the U.S. constitution.

You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.

If you think the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm, you’re being utterly delusional.

> the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm

Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?

The Dutch West Indies Corporation ate entire countries for breakfast, and wasn't hiding it either. While tech companies can certainly play a role in communication when overthrowing governments, they aren't usually rolling in to other countries and taking over whatever they want.

The British East India was also founded around the same time. Their cultural impact was at the time certainly as vast as Facebook's, the company literally passed laws in India.

The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March

I don't agree that laws influence culture.