> I don't believe governments should force private companies or people to publish or say things they don't want to.

Do you believe governments should force private companies to serve people they don’t want to? If so, then you understand how civil rights work. It’s not enough to ensure the government respects our rights, the government must also ensure that private companies respect our rights. Free speech has become a civil rights issue.

I believe governments should prevent companies from discriminating against people in very limited ways. These are protected characterists such as race or sexual orientation Generally these are things that are innate to a person and are not a matter of choice for them.

I don't believe political viewpoints fall into that category, but I'm willing to hear any good arguments that they should be.

> I don't believe political viewpoints fall into that category, but I'm willing to hear any good arguments that they should be.

If you don’t believe that political viewpoints should be a protected category then you are condoning private entities pressuring the public into certain political viewpoints. If I cannot use Spotify unless I agree with their politics then that will strongly influence me to agree with their politics to the extent that their product has utility in my life, which may be to a significant degree. This may be in a situation where my politics wouldn’t ordinarily align with Spotify’s if I were left to my own critical thinking.

I believe we should generally limit the amount of influence private companies have on the political viewpoints of the population. Especially when these private companies can be very powerful corporations controlled by a relatively small amount of people. Especially in a democracy.

I do agree that the control that just a few large monopolies have over public discourse and information flow is a huge problem.

I think we need to limit their power by ensuring that no company can have such a monopoly, and I'd like to see greater choice and interoperability. Break up the network effect that gives them this control.

I don't think making political viewpoints a protected characteristic is a good way to achieve that, and would cause as many problems as it would solve.

> I don't think making political viewpoints a protected characteristic is a good way to achieve that, and would cause as many problems as it would solve.

By this logic, civil rights for race, etc. was not a good way to solve the discrimination issue. The real solution would have been to break up large companies since if there are no large companies then different races and sexes could just open up their own businesses to serve their own communities without the need to force other small business owners to serve people they do not want to serve.

But that is obviously not the problem civil rights aim to solve. Allowing companies to discriminate by any identity characteristic promotes the Balkanization of society which is something we do not want. Democrat and republican enclaves are just as fractious to the nation as white and black enclaves.

What problems would civil rights for political orientation cause that civil rights for race, sex, etc. do not cause?

You raise some excellent points, and I don't have comprehensive answers to them. At the very least you're making me re-evaluate my position.

I agree balkanisation is a big issue. We actually have that anyway with large service providers hosting everything, e.g. filter bubbles, AI driven news feeds, etc. Balkanisation in information flow can be mitigated by requiring interoperability protocols, to prevent lock-in to particular service providers.

I want to remove the ability of large companies to be able to monitor and manipulate information flow in society. Not just for political viewpoints, but for everything. So I guess I have wider goals than this specific issue.

To your question on what problems would be caused by civil rights for political viewpoints that don't apply to the others, I would return to the fact that other protected characteristics are essentially innate to a person and aren't a matter of choice, and are relatively easy to define. Pretty much anything anyone says can be viewed as a political statement, or it can be argued as such. You would have to carve out a large number of exceptions and argue them all on a case by case basis, and by law in many cases. Is hate speech permitted? Incitement to violence? Spreading dangerous mis-information? Who assesses whether a statement is a political statement or an exception that is not protected?

I don't see the above as any kind of rebuttal of your position. I'm still thinking about your arguments, it's just what I have right now. Not sure how much longer we can go in this thread, but thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!

> Is hate speech permitted? Incitement to violence? Spreading dangerous mis-information? Who assesses whether a statement is a political statement or an exception that is not protected?

To address this question, there is at least 200 years of US common law available to evaluate whether or not something should be protected under the first amendment. I’m simply suggesting that we protect the same rights to speech in the private sphere that we already do in the public sphere, at the very least for companies whose main line of business is serving as a platform for the speech of others that would otherwise be generally open to the public. In the age of privately owned and centralized online media platforms and marketplaces, extending civil rights to free speech seems logical.

> thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!

Thank you too