That's not enforcement, that's asking the user to do self-policing.

If you tried "enforcing" the age limit in a bar in this manner, I think we all know what a judge would say.

No. Nobody knows what a judge will say. That's one of the first things they teach in 11th grade legal studies.

That aside, self-policing exists in other areas of the law... in fact, it's a common feature in western democracy.

What is your stance on the wedding cake issue? Is a baker within their rights to withhold service from certain customers, because his beliefs do not align with theirs? And if so, how is that any different to the issue at hand?

Incidentally, I saw a story this morning about a girl whose Instagram account was cancelled because her user name matched a recently popularised TV show which has the same name, despite the fact that she has used that name for many years.

Is that fair? Probably not. Is it legal? Absolutely. In their T&Cs it says that they can cancel your account without a reason. You have to agree to that in order to use their service. What would happen in court? Nobody knows, but they could probably afford better lawyers than her.

Hmmm so if I choose to open a liquor store that also sells assault rifles and handguns, has roulette and hookers in the back, I should be able to have combo sales and put up a sign saying "We don't require proof of age", yeah? Obviously in part, No, because I can't choose a policy that breaks a law (yeah... it was reductio ad absurdum). If your Constitution, the most fundamental list of basic human rights laws, claims "equality under the law" how can a discriminatory policy based on politics, philosophy, shoe styles or sizes etc. be upheld?

Already there are some laws in most democratic countries that trade regulation for the right to even open a business in that country's economic and legal environment to insure their Constitution is supreme law for anyone choosing to be a citizen. Even in that context "choose" assumes everyone has the power to actually choose when not everyone does. Choosing in your mind only without the power to effect any change is essentially useless. If nobody for miles around will sell you food, water, clothing, gasoline, electricity ... any basic service or material needs for basic survival, or, a step further, even choose to hire you for a job for which you're well qualified. or wait! a step further the schooling to become qualified, it's easy to see some regulation is required to prevent lopsided, what should be lawbreaking, private choices.

Freedom is obviously important and desirable but it is not absolute in any civilized society or freedom dissolves when one persons freedom is used to take away anothers' freedom. "Get along" interaction is basic to civilization. If you think you should be absolutely free to do anything you desire, to enact every whim, maybe you should buy an island and see how well that works out for you.

Social media is just part of the problems that come with what used to be "The Wild West" of the Internet. We have yet to work out how such services best serve civilization. Look how long even the most enlightened countries took to require such things as "Truth in Lending" or "Truth in Advertising" and also what happens when such regulation erodes. This is especially so when the New Golden Rule is "He who has the gold, makes the rules".

This business was totally misunderstood by the lower courts (not to mention the press) and it took the Supreme Court to inject a bit of common sense into the matter. The issue was not whether the bakers could refuse to serve a gay man (under UK law they couldn't and they hadn't tried to) or a man with political opinions about marriage which they disapproved of (again they hadn't actually done that) but whether they could be forced to publish, in the form of an iced slogan, a view they considered morally repugnant. The judges quickly concluded that there was nothing in English law which could compel any person, religious or otherwise, to do that.

Had the judges of the lower courts done their job properly, a lot of public money would have been saved. And had the man been prepared to modify his specification for the cake, he could have had it without any problems.

See https://hrussman.neocities.org/ramblings/cake.html

Time for a new job if it requires a corporation, law or government; reasons,,, many can't do for themselves?

So, let me see if I've got this right: A private business entity can rightly and legally refuse to publish opinions with which they disagree. Or perhaps even: A private business entity cannot lawfully be compelled to publish opinions with which they disagree.

How did I do?

Badly, if you're describing the bakery case.

An artist cannot be forced to produce a work promoting a message with which they disagree, because that would be compelled speech. In a similar vain, a tailor may refuse to make an SS uniform, a printer may refuse to manufacture Black Lives Matter placards, and a painter may decline to paint a UK police car in rainbow colours.

But you're right that a private business should be free to decide what they do or do not want to publish. That's called "being a publisher," and a publisher is legally liable for everything they publish.

Then there's being a platform, and those businesses are not legally responsible for what's being published or communicated. Phone companies are not responsible for people making threatening phone calls or planning terrorism via text messages, the post office is not responsible for mail bombs, and Amazon Web Services/Elastic Cloud are not liable for crimes committed by their customers.

All the above can of course be compelled to cease providing services to a customer by a court of law. And they and their customers are all subject to various laws and regulations.

If you listen to Zuckerberg, he clearly wants Facebook to be a platform. However, political activists keep pressuring them to curate content and remove legal speech from their platform, which makes them increasingly a publisher. Shouldn't they then be liable for the content they publish, just like with The New York Times and their comments section?

Loomer v Facebook [2020]: "Under well-established law, neither Facebook nor any other publisher can be liable for failing to publish someone else’s message."

Six4three v Facebook [2019]: "Facebook is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment."

But in any case, be they publisher or platform, they're a private business entity and cannot be compelled to provide service to any particular individuals.

Yes, these decisions are indeed diametrically opposed to the legislation Facebook claims to be protected by, so both positions cannot possibly be correct.

There's a reason why no-one in the political establishment wants this anywhere near the US Supreme Court. So instead of proposing legislation, political actors are putting pressure on the social media giants under the guise of concepts like "hate speech", "causing harm", or being "dangerous to democracy."
Except where compelled by law. Which means you cannot deny service based on "protected characteristics" like race. It's being proposed in at least one state that political affiliation be added to the list.

Unless they're publishers. In which case, they cannot be compelled to publish opinions with which they disagree... Right?

Denying service != refusing to publish.

But yes. If you are a publisher, you are the curator of the content and responsible for everything you publish. That's why you can't be compelled to publish, say, an article on a web site, because that would mean someone could compel you to commit libel or otherwise incriminate yourself.

Of course, once you've taken on the role of a publisher, you've also taken on the responsibilities of a publisher. You're personally responsible for everything you publish, and you can be sued. Publishers have no immunity, because no-one is compelling them to publish anything.

Surely the whole issue is that you cannot be both a publisher and a neutral platform at the same time because those two things are mutually incompatible. Yet that is precisely the kind of oxymoron that Facebook claims to be. When people complain about the Taliban using FB to promote their poisonous ideas, Zuckerborg says that he runs a platform, not a publisher, and he is no more responsible for how people use it than a telephone company is for how people (including terrorists) use their phones. But when he doesn't like what someone says (and it seems that there are a lot of people whom he dislikes more than he does the Taliban), he claims a publisher's right to refuse to let them speak on his platform.

How can people not see that this is self-contradictory?

I don't know if this misspelling is intentional, but it's genius either way.

It wasn't intentional but the pun is quite well known and that probably guided my hand.

I respectfully disagree. Twitter is a public square, according to its CEO. The internet as a whole, is a public square. I don't know who the owner of this website is, but I would not consider linuxquestions to be a public square since it has a very specific purpose. Rules and laws have already been laid out for public squares, and you can't just evict someone because you don't like their opinion. Which, let's be clear, Twitter and Facebook are doing just that.

If I was absolute dictator the US, I would do away with social media altogether. But I'm not, and never will be, so that will never happen.

Further, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and others, are not private companies. I see this falsehood being repeated over and over again. They are publicly traded companies on the stock exchange and therefor are not subject to the same freedoms as a private company would. But rules and laws are built around protecting big business (which are mostly public) and squashing small business (which are mostly private), so that's partly why said companies get away with what they do.