I have never taken "free speech" to mean "in all places, all the time," so I don't see a conflict. The public sphere (irl and on the internet) is where people are advocating for free speech. A private company's internal email list does not qualify.
I don't understand why so many people have a hard time understanding this even though it has been repeated like a million times at this point. Are these people illiterate or using some kind of TSLAQ block list like in Twitter, because they're afraid of seeing any dissenting opinions?