> This is akin to you saying "they choose to spread cat pictures when it benefits them with no legal consequences". Conspiracy theories, like cat pictures, are perfectly legal, there's no reason why there should be legal consequences for allowing them on the site.

The problem is the undue influence created by the juxtaposition of the circumstances that you have chosen to respond to separately.

> Yes, when you own a website you can pick and choose what appears on the site, that's just how property rights work.

What if the ISP decides not to serve your website to people who want to visit it? Is that also how property rights work? What if the electric company decides not to sell you electricity? Is that how property rights work?

> You can't legislate influence, it's not something that anybody owns, it's freely given by individual users and can be trivially revoked at any time. This dynamic is exactly the reason why YouTube is so sensitive to social issues, their influence among target demographics will suffer if they fail to appease certain values. Consider the recent collapse of Fox News' influence as another example of this effect on the opposite side of the spectrum.

You can absolutely consider whether you're creating circumstances that put a small number of people in positions of disproportionate influence when you write legislation to regulate what they are and are not liable for.

> Yet they're not inherently political, the efficacy of masks and vaccines are well established from a medical perspective.

Medicine is also political and the efficacy of vaccines is not a thing that is established once and for all, each vaccine has to be tested to determine its effectiveness and those tests, how they are performed, and their outcomes are all inherently political. For example, see the allegations against Merck that they lied about the effectiveness of their MMR vaccine.

The effectiveness and allocation of masks is also political, look to earlier this year when the CDC recommended against wearing of masks by the general public.

> The reason why it lacks practical meaning is because there is no agreed upon definition for what meets the standard of political.

Thats not a barrier to practical meaning, it just means that anything could be found to be political. For example, two people could bring similar actions in court and one be rejected because there was no evidence that it was in fact political, whereas the other could be accepted because there was evidence that it was in fact political.

> The protected classes are discrete personal qualities of the individual, "political leaning" is an abstract idea without clear boundaries. You might as well say "I'm against discrimination of people based on their ideas", the concept is just too nebulous to be meaningful.

I am against discrimination of people based on their ideas, and I suppose we'll have to disagree and the meaningfulness of this concept.

I think my earlier example is clear:

>> Permitting someone to discriminate their provision of services on the basis of someone's gay marriage is just as offensive as permitting them to discriminate on the basis of someone's support for the legality of gay marriage.

The fact that people could conceivably disagree on whether a given issue is political and therefore disagree about whether it is a prohibited basis upon which to discriminate is immaterial. Discrimination suits already deal with this issue.