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That’s usually a nice side-effect. This is a bigger trend developing in tech, I think ... the exact contours of why various C-levels are pushing this now is yet to be seen (not every company policy change to this effect was announced on a blog post, it’s happening elsewhere too).

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I honestly think people are reading too much into this. They straight out say that discussions were turning toxic. That presumably impacted the ability of teams to be productive in the jobs they were paid to do. That's the why.

From what I see, lots of people who object to this policy change raised a (legitimate) concern: where is the evidence supporting the claim? It’s not like corporations have ever had any problem firing people over productivity issues. If people argue over political topics all day at work and that turns out to affect their productivity negatively, it’s much less controversial for the company to act upon it from a performance angle.

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