Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio.
So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer on a quasi-professional network - what did she expect?
"Well, they're a private company and they can fire who they want to." Or if you prefer, "freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies".
Personally, I think this weird mash-up of the personal and the private has landed us in a new and fresh hell and it's only going to get worse. Eventually we'll need to find a way out or we'll get to the zainy ends of your employer firing you because of the way you voted or what you wrote in your diary - but we need to be consistent in our separation between personal and corporate.
Also don’t bite the hand that feeds you. If you disagree with the hand so vehemently quit and take up the cause.
There will always be someone offended by anything you do. I'm atheist and have no problem celebrating Christmas or Diwali or whatever with my colleagues from work. I guess it entirely depends on the type of person you are.
I'd in fact in many cases be less happy if they took away things from my colleagues to please me.
I don't eat blood or strangled meat but don't mess up other people's celebrations and blame it on me.
As long as I'm not forced to be part of it just give me something else that I like and I'm happy.
If you leave religion at the door, you would not have Christmas party.
* https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/10/01/coinbase-w...
The exact details matter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There are parts of the world where you can be fired for being gay. In most of the US where you can be fired for being trans. There are parts of the US where having TAMPONS in a women's bathroom is considered "political".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.G._%26_G.R._Harris_Funeral_H...
I do see what though, as it's supposed to be accepted as a basic premise of society that we set laws and follow them, and all accept the responsibility of ensuring that those laws are followed.
The left-wing employees may have the political power within the company, but the algorithm maximizing clicks could end up recommending right-wing content because more users click on it.
So maybe YouTube is relatively more popular with right wing, and Twitter with left wing... which would make the average YouTube user more right-wing than the average of the population (and the average Twitter user more left-wing that the average of the population).
It could even be some statistical artifact. Maybe the audience is divided 50:50, but e.g. left-wing users are more likely to produce their own videos. That would mean that right-wing videos have on average more views per video.
It could be an artifact of censorship itself: suppose that e.g. extreme right-wing is 5% of population, and they produce 5% of videos. But half of those videos are removed by YouTube. If they keep using the same search terms, the surviving videos will have twice more views per video. And if then YouTube moderators freak out and delete half of those, the views of the remaining half will double again, feeding a spiral of hysteric moderation and extreme popularity of the few surviving fringe videos. (And it doesn't help if the content-agnostic algorithm predicts -- correctly -- that the popularity of these videos is likely to skyrocket.)
https://nypost.com/2021/02/19/white-house-working-with-socia...
The important point here is that limits on speech and free expression in American discourse have traditionally gone hand in hand with a fear of foreign influence. If anything, that gives more of a moral edge to the argument over free speech, not less.
"Are we bound hand and foot that we must be witnesses to these deadly thrusts at our liberty?" (The thrusts were words on paper.) "Are these approaches to revolution and Jacobinic domination to be observed with the eye of meek submission? No, sir, they are indeed terrible; they are calculated to freeze the very blood in our veins. Such liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man."
The target of this speech, by a proponent of the Sedition act, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a printer and native son of Pennsylvania.
My point is just that I'm deeply skeptical of moral principles encoded in the Constitution. I think it's a good system, a set of functional and useful institutions, not something I would want to fuck with, &c. Maybe not my moral north star, though.
Safe speech isn't free speech. Free speech is the engine of change for things like trans rights, same sex marriage, equal protection under the law and even evolution being taught in schools.
If you do not hold free speech as a moral value, if you don't feel a moral duty to use speech that may be censored or unfavored, then you don't agree with using speech to fix social problems.
Why exactly is free speech something important in the private arena?
I still don't think it's a moral value on its own.