European here so it may not be clear to me, but I thought discriminating against religious movements like the church or trump supporters is still illegal. Correct?
It's complicated and the implications and scope are not entirely clear.
The court stated that creative works such as web design qualify as a form of speech, and that the first amendment does not allow the government to use law to force creators to speak any message — especially one with which they disagree. Essentially, any business with something that might be considered speech as its product or service may be free to discriminate against protected classes. We aren't sure how far this will extend in practice, but I expect many will test it.
In this case of this post, it depends on what is being sold.
Edit: wrote this before my coffee and thus neglected to point out what replies said: political affiliation is not a protected class in America and these signs are a bit misleading. See replies.
These signs are surely in response to the recent US Supreme Court ruling which allowed a website designer to refuse to make websites for same-sex weddings.
First, churches are religious; Trump supporters are political, and not religious. In the US, religion is a "protected class", but political alignment is not. But traditionally, political alignment or part affiliation is not discriminated against, even if it is federall legal to do so. (Various states may have their own clauses making political alignment a protected class in certain contexts, I'm not sure.) Also important to this discussion is that sexual preference is not a protected class federally, although I know that many states have enshrined protection for sexual preference in their own state laws.
If a case were brought about discrimination against Trump supporters because of these signs, in a jurisdiction where politics was not a protected class, I should expect that that case would fail, under current law. But just like SCOTUS is highly political right now, lower courts are, too, especially lower federal courts. It's anybody's guess as to whether a given judge would actually adhere to existing case law.
For the religious side of these signs, it gets interesting. As above, SCOTUS has ruled that a religious business owner can discriminate against customers based on the business owner's "religious disagreement" with a position held by the customer, presumably where that disagreement does not overlap with a protected class.
And there's the rub. Religion is a protected class, so it should be prohibited to discriminate against someone for their religious position. This, however, really tips the scales in favor of the religious: the religious business owner can discriminate on the basis of their own religious belief, but no one can discriminate against them because of that same religious belief. To me, this seems to tread very heavily on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...
"Congress," in this context, has been interpreted by the courts to mean more generally "the government," at any level. The recent SCOTUS ruling gives a religious business owner the right to discriminate on the basis of their religion, but the right of other people to discriminate against that business owner on the exact same basis remains prohibited. Again, I am not a lawyer, but that seems to be clearly in opposition to the Establishment Clause.
All of this is interesting, but none of it is cause for concern.
What is cause for concern is the foundation of Obergefell, which made same sex marriage legal in all of the US. That basis is that the only difference between opposite sex and same sex marriages is the sex of one of the people in the couple. An argument I recall from the time was that prohibiting same sex marriage is unconstitutional, because to do so would be discriminating against someone on the basis of sex - which is a protected class. However, that does not appear to have been mentioned in the court's ruling.
No matter the reason, if it is unconstitutional to discriminate against same sex couples in the context of their getting married in the first place, it should stand to reason that it would be unconstitutional to discriminate against those same sex couples in any other context. Reason does not appear to be this court's strong suit; they have decided that the rights of religious people to discriminate on the basis of their personal and individual beliefs "trumps" (pun intended) the rights of people (religious or not) to not be discriminated against.
This is a "canary in a coal mine" to overturn all manner of previous courts' rulings: Obergefell (same sex marriage), Loving v Virginia (interracial marriage), Griswold (access to contraception), Lawrence v Texas (legalization of homosexuality), and certainly others.
Again, all of this seems to prioritize religion, which is in clear opposition of the Establishment Clause.
Political affiliation is not a protected class. You are permitted to discriminate based on politics. Religious affiliation is a protected class. You cannot discriminate solely on the basis of religion... Until now.
Conservatives love to discriminate, but their new rulings are also making it easier to discriminate against them.
Political affiliation is not protected, religious affiliation is. It’s true that the Right has been doing their level best to politicise their religious feelings into public life, so that barring Trump supporters effectively excludes Evangelicals and a majority of Catholics. This may not be their desired outcome, but perhaps they shouldn’t have tied their religious sentiment to political causes.
Religions are protected classes under the constitution, political groups are not. Free speech is also protected. The combination of these factors means that weather the shop keeper in OPs photo is breaking the law is entirely dependant on how you interpret the constitution, which is what the supreme court is supposed to do.
I think the shop in question could get in trouble over the church statement if they are not doing something “free speech” related, that is the only way the new ruling applies. Though what the free speech bit means is gonna depend on what the fedsoc six want, and they will steer it to the GOP always.
I got a $600 projector and have about 90 inch display ( can hit 120 if my apartment was bigger). No need to go to a cinema, overpay for drinks and snacks, and I can pause and pee whenever I want.
I have a very good setup at home but we still like going to the cinema once in a while, it’s more of an event and we don’t spend the movie with our nose in our phones.
We do select movies where it’s worth it, big action, etc. Last one was the new avatar in “4D” where they splash you with sprays, the seats move and you feel the wind, pretty cool.
If your only goal is to reduce bots, then yes it should be successful. However, this limits the amount of time people can spend on the app. Which is the antithesis of what a successful social media platform wants to do and what ad agencies what to do.
Ultimately if he sticks with this it’s going to be a death blow for the platform.
I don’t see how this limits bots at all. You can simply spin up a hundred thousand bots and you’ll be able to crawl 30 million posts a day. At best it will slow bots down for a week while they refactor how their systems work.
I’m not familiar with Twitter, but putting a cap on how much content you can view on a social media website doesn’t seem like a smart move. If people are seriously doom-scrollers and hit the wall, they won’t be happy. “Free speech absolutists” will be pissed when they see that there’s a limit to their access to “free speech.” Involving paid teirs also looks greedy.
All of that aside, there are better ways to fight bots rather than limiting their daily access. Bots will still be able to scrape a large amount of data daily. Why put a cap on how many posts you can view in a day instead of detecting accounts who are viewing posts at a much higher speed? I doubt most human users will interact at the speed of a bot, and the accounts who do can be verified as real.
Writing a code to detect bots is harder than putting a usage cap, though. That would require employees and Musk actually asking for someone to do something he can’t.
Supposedly if you spend about 10 minutes reading tweets, skimming through replies, etc, you’ll hit the 300 post limit and be unable to use the app until the next day. Only letting people use the site for 10 minutes is clearly bad. And most people just are not going to pay to be able to use the app.
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month’s time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at ‘2023-05-28’ and the most recent date is given as ‘2023-06-26’. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 5,000 users, with an upper limit of 50,000 users. There is a green trend like and a blue trend line graphed from plot points at every horizontal interval. The green line is labelled ‘Active users monthly’ shows increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 1,000 users from the ‘05-28’ date mark to the ‘05-31’ mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 10,000 users, starting to show a trend similar to the beginning of an exponential growth curve. At the ‘06-11’ date mark, the line begins increasing at a relatively steady rate, with the last marked date showing just over 45,000 users. There are two points in which the line shows an apparent indication of levelling off in user count, before then showing a sudden increase in users again, with neither of these points significantly impacting the overall upward trend. These points are at the dates ‘06-16’ and ‘06-21’. The second graphed line, the blue line, is labelled ‘Active Users Half year’ and starts at approximately 3,000 users, but follows an almost identical trend shape as the green line as it increases approximately parallel to it. The blue line ends at around 48,000 users at the final graphed point.]
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
The sad part is that all the Musk evangelists (and there are a lot of them) will happily pay for a ‘verified’ account if they happen to exceed the limit.
A fool and their money are easily parted. That won’t be nearly enough people to offset the mind boggingly large losses of Twitter, however - so they’re basically just burning it for a sense of pride and accomplishment.
lemmy.world
Active