Deciding not to associate with you or provide you with a platform for saying what you want has nothing to do with your ability to say it. Enjoy Substack.
I think you say that with some amount of snark, but both sides of the argument agree with this. It isn't controversial to say twitter isn't legally or socially obligated to give you a platform to practice free speech.
The fact Musk wants to turn it into a platform for free speech doesn't imply that he believes twitter has that burden of responsibility, only that he thinks it would be a good thing if they took on that responsibility.
It's also not hypocritical for Musk to say twitter would be a good platform to take on the responsibility of free speech while also saying workplace communication is not a good platform to take on the responsibility of free speech.
Now whether you or I agree with his stance on either of these points is another subject entirely, but it is not hypocrisy as other comments seem to be suggesting.
If the employees had posted on twitter instead, he totally still would have fired them. Musk just wants to be able to speak without consequences, while he’s perfectly happy to impose consequences on speech by his employees
and it still wouldn't be hyprocritical - free speech has nothing to do with being able to say anything somewhere and avoid consequences. It only has to do with protecting your ability to say those things.
If you call your friend mean things on twitter and your friend decides to stop talking to you, freedom of speech has not been violated.
“Consequences for thee, not for me” feels pretty hypocritical. In this case Musk wants the consequences for speech be limited to things (like being fired) that he doesn’t have to worry about because he is rich.
If you're an employee at spacex and Musk uses internal communications to say something you don't like, you can leave spacex, which would be a consequence for musk's actions. So your point doesn't hold. He is not immune from the consequences of his speech in the exact same scenario.
A job is little more than a business relationship where a person agrees to do labor in exchange for money. Either side of that relationship has the ability to terminate that relationship as a consequence of speech they might not like.
The better approach is to form a union, in order to address the colossal power imbalance between SpaceX's executive committee and the people who do the actual work. It's likely you'll get fired for that as well, but it's better than leaving in "protest". Elon Musk probably spends 50x more time thinking about his hair plugs than he does about engineers departing his companies.
Either way, to act like this "business relationship" is perfectly reciprocal is either naive or malintentioned.
I agree, unionization at face value seems to be a great tool to empower workers. As for reciprocity I don't think anyone is suggesting it's perfectly balanced. If you're using that phrasing as a device to suggest it's extremely unbalanced then I would wonder what data you're using to come to that conclusion. It is, after all an entirely voluntary relationship being formed in a country with no shortage of jobs.
Nobody has argued that Twitter cannot ban people from their platform at will because of what they say. The argument has always been that it's a bad idea for them to do so for a whole variety of reasons:
1. The inevitable inconsistency in application creates hypocrisy, which makes people upset.
2. It attracts political attention if/when the enforcement is politically biased.
3. It costs large sums of money that could be spent on other things.
4. It isn't actually necessary.
5. Public forums in which ideas can duke it out are essential for a healthy democratic society. Someone needs to run them, so if you decide to create an explicitly public forum open to everyone then you have a moral duty to protect and implement free speech policies
etc etc. Not an exhaustive list by any means, just a subset of the arguments that can be mounted.
But note that none of these apply to the case of employees criticizing their employer.
It actually does, if you own the single dominant platform in the space where the conversations are happening.
Speech isn't just about the act of saying, but also being able to be heard. Anyone can whisper to themselves in bed, but that is not speech in the political sense. Being able to speak where nobody hears is doesn't mean you have free speech.
Lots of people can hear you on Substack, Gab, etc. Accept that other people will practice their right not to associate with you. If so many of you aren't going to admit someone else's right not to be fired for trivialities then I do not want to hear about this right to be heard crap either.
