Liking the wrong thing might not get you persecuted or killed in your current time and place, but there's no guarantee that those opinions which are safe to hold here and now will continue to be safe.
Social media creates a semi-public record for bad actors to identify targets to persecute for whatever they've decided to retroactively declare to be a crime. That may be a small risk in a stable democracy, but it's still worth considering due to the magnitude of the potential consequences.
That is a good point. If any type of legislation should come out of this, it should be about usage of social media data by companies. They should not be able to discriminate people because of things they do in their private lives. In fact, they shouldn't have the right to investigate it unless it relates to the job (i.e. checking that a community manager does in fact use Twitter and Facebook in an efficient way). There may be exceptions but for 90% of the jobs out there - it makes no sense.
It's just very hard to make laws against that. There are laws forbidding discrimination based on gender and race, yet we still know that this is commonplace.
I personally think it is better to tackle the issue by making it harder/impossible for companies to obtain this data and allowing users to force companies to delete ANY data they have on them by request.
It is hard but needs to exist. Discrmination will always exist and its no reason to give up and not have a law. The law is important.
Information should be freely available. Making it impossible to obtain would lead towards information control like China and Russia. Its the wrong approach.
Gambling won't kill you either, but we still try and encourage people to gamble responsibly rather than become addicts. An unhealthy behaviour doesn't have to be physically unhealthy to be an issue.
