Also retaliation is very much still illegal, not that it matters.
Wasn't that an old Soviet or similar joke? "In {country_name}, we have freedom of speech. What we don't have is freedom after speech".
Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, just like in the USA?.
Yes. In the USA you can stand in front of the White House and shout "Down with Reagan!", and you will not be punished. Equally, you can stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell "Down with Reagan!", and you will still not be punished.
Weird the incestuous circles of tech.
I think what's really funny is that North Korea has freedom of speech in their constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea#:~...
You have a right to speak. You just need to expect a bullet through your head shortly afterward.
Elon takes the “freedom from consequences” interpretation of free speech when it comes to his complaints about twitter and “cancel culture”, then turns around and effectively cancels these employees for speaking their mind.
I understand the point, but I hate this saying. After all, what more is the government throwing you in jail for speech than a “consequence”?
The spirit of “free speech” does not give you a free pass to impose draconian “consequences” in response to speech you don’t like.
“the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501, 506 (1946).
The Supreme Court has since backtracked on the Marsh opinion somewhat, but some states such as California have ruled that reasonable exercise of speech and of petition rights on privately owned shopping malls are protected activities.
What are the Terms of Service (EULA) of a public shopping mall? What are they for Twitter?
When you click on "I agree" to the terms of software, or a website, what did you agree to? Where do you click "I agree" when visiting a shopping mall?
There is usually an inconspicuously posted sign that indicates 'no loitering, no spitting, no foul language' etc. or they reserve the right to throw you out.
In Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck[0], however, the Court ruled against the premise in regards to a public access television station, and maintained that the station remained a private actor despite being a "public forum."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...
By that definition, everyone in the world has freedom of speech.
To focus the scope, it means openly criticizing the governing body is protected and not a punishable offense _by the government_ (people can and have been let go for political posts on social media written from their home, if the employer felt it was damaging to the company's reputation).
And no, literally billions of people in the world do not have that right.
SpaceX is not a town square and never will be, nor is any private company. I doubt even Twitter employees will be able to say what they like on Twitter without fear of being fired from Twitter. It's only about removing you from the platform.
There's no hypocrisy, it lines up exactly with his past actions and his past words.
Both are private property.
Both are private property, yes. And you are correct that twitter legally has as much right to do whatever they want with their product and restrict it however they want as United Airlines does. That's not the point being made here at all and has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
The parent comment I originally replied to was saying "how can twitter even he a public square if it is a private company, that's a contradiction". And I was just saying that there is nothing preventing a private company from having a product that behaves like a public square, hence that isn't a contradiction or an oxymoron.
Thus stands the difference. Capisce?
I'm unclear how that means I should be able to say whatever I want at my job and still keep the job. For example, if I work at Tesla and say I think electric cars are stupid and the ICE are superior, I would imagine I would be fired. I don't think that's a free speech violation, but rather that my opinion is in conflict with the goals of the company.
I hate that people are doing all these weird gymnastics to reconcile being a champion of free speech and firing people that criticize you.
Yeah, guys, it might be legal (maybe not) but it IS hypocritical. If you want to champion free speech you can't do this shit. Stop with the debate team bullshit and exercise some common sense.
[0] Now Elon has recently said in that video call to Twitter employees that free speech doesn't mean a right to an audience, but it's hard to square that statement with his previous statements.
This is incoherent. Musk can express that he wants Twitter to moderate according to free speech principles--that's not the same thing as asserting that Twitter has a legal responsibility to moderate according to free speech principles.
Moreover, censorship doesn't require the censor to be the State--a private platform can censor content, and they often do.
Per the ACLU:
> Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups.
Per Wikipedia:
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies.
This is untrue. He believes that the Twitter _product_ should be run like a public forum, town square, shopping mall, or whatever you want to call it.
> and instead guarantee an audience for people
Also untrue. Let's use Trump in this example. He doesn't believe everyone should be forced to listen to Trump. He believes everyone should be able to access everything Trump has ever said on the platform (barring illegal things that must be removed).
Free speech protects individuals from government prosecution only. It has nothing to do with employment or labor law.
Generally, It doesn’t apply to ‘privately owned companies’ Just like how these employees are free to criticize their employer it does not mean there are freedom of consequences and employers are just as free to fire their employees.
That is why they stay anonymous and criticize their employer just like what happened with Coinbase.
Why let a pesky little thing like intellectual honesty stand in the way of jumping on a good hate bandwagon?
You're just seeing the psychic ripples of all the Elon fanboys and pseudo-libertarian technofascists wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of their savior turning out to be a pretty vanilla corporate capitalist.
After all the chest-thumping and general toxicity I find their discomfort endlessly amusing.
No doubt it is amusing, but it doesn't compare to the detractors having a meltdown after his every move.
Criticism of Musk's action here may come both from those who in fact are in the "free speech absolutist" camp and want both the Twitter deplorables and the corporate gadflies to be protected from retaliation, and from those who are just in the latter position and want the opposite pattern, but I think only the first group can bring a charge of hypocrisy (still incorrect, as it ignores the orthogonality) without it making themselves guilty of higher-order hypocrisy.
If you look at other companies that give the woke cry bullies and their subjective feelings precedent over the mission, you can see that it creates a toxic workplace, hostile environments, further segmentation of workers into cliques, and other unpleasantries that hurt the mission, and ultimately the bottom line for that company.
If you look at the nuances; they were fired for participating in actions that can not only be considered insubordination, but also abuse of company resources and harassment of employees who just want to do their job and not cater to the worthless feelings of people who have crippling self-esteem issues.
Dumping the woke cry babies is the right decision here. Engagement only serves to embolden work cry bullies who are used to getting their way.
By reacting emotionally and using terms like "work cry babies" you weaken your own ability to think critically and fairly about this. You are also more likely to derail the conversation and prevent debate with people who may disagree with your views but could be open to them. Save these sorts of insults and grandstanding for reddit and twitter and keep them off of hn.
> If you look at other companies that give the woke cry bullies and their subjective feelings precedent over the mission, you can see that it creates a toxic workplace, hostile environments, further segmentation of workers into cliques, and other unpleasantries that hurt the mission, and ultimately the bottom line for that company.
I am willing to explore your argument that engaging with members of a company that are overly critical of that company hurts the company in the long term. Can you cite some examples?
> If you look at the nuances; they were fired for participating in actions that can not only be considered insubordination
The question I have is not if the company did or did not have a legal right to fire them. I'll leave that to the legal professionals. Rather I wonder if engagement with dissenters in this case would be harmful or productive. I tend to favor the notion that systems which attempt to maintain unity by casting out those who offer dissenting public voices tend to become monocultures and echo chambers. I don't discount the value of monocultures and echo chambers, they can be extremely valuable, but I don't see how SpaceX benefits by building one.
Harmful.
First, Any dissent around company product choices is acceptable but comes with a risk depending on the level of expression. Smart companies learn to cultivate this kind of dissent and provided it doesn't detract from the mission itself, its probably the right decision.
Second, the company should fire on the spot any dissent that is not directly work related. It detracts from the mission.
The petition in question violated both precepts of allowable dissent.
For #1 let's say for the sake of argument that the dissent was honest, and strictly trained at the company's tactics in marketing (i fundamentally disagree, see #2) . If the marketing tactics are a failure, that is the board's prerogative to change CEO. However, the petition is violating the allowable levels of expression by usurping power from the Board itself. That is a level of expression many levels above the petitioner's role or level in the org, extremely noisy (affects all employees), and public. The petition literally violated all norms around tolerable dissent, and should be fireable on the spot.
For #2, the petition asked silence CEO speech which is not 100% product related. The hint of this is that the petition is loaded with complaints about "public behavior" and "embarrassment" which are clues into the intent is for this to be a political decision to intervene, not a product one. Words like embarrassment when targeting an individuals are meant to discuss individuals, not products. More importantly, when the petition targets speech which includes a number of opinions that are personal, and not product, this becomes political.
Let's take examples of each:
For #1, would people would get fired on the spot if employees circulated a petition saying they wanted the CPO to be "reined in" for refusing to carry Elise chassis in models subsequent to the Roadster ? The answer is yes.
For #2 This used to be very rare in the past, so it was never tested until recently.. I believe the most high-profile firing has been the firing of the Red Bull - US CEO and US Head of HR by the German board. They were engaged in activism not work related, and both got the boot.
A long time ago when I was a young engineer I worked at a few hundred person startup. Many of the employees of this startup were from cultures spoke bluntly and embraced cynicism and pessimism. Every two weeks the CEO would have an all hands meeting. For any hour he would answer any question from any employee. Many of these questions were, to my American ears, as disrespectful. The question might assume the CEO took a particular action for some sinister reason such as having stolen company funds and getting ready to fire everyone. Or just blunt say to the CEO "I think all the executives are incompetent and should be fired". The hardest questions were questions about "if market changes and we are fucked, here are indicator the market is changed and we are fucked."
The CEO would listen to the question and then respond. The responses were never defensive, never rude but honest and straight forward. As far as I could tell everyone felt better after those meetings and respected the CEO more for openly facing and addressing as best he could the fears that everyone at the company had.
> Second, the company should fire on the spot any dissent that is not directly work related. It detracts from the mission.
I do consider this dissent at SpaceX to be work related. Musk does significant harm the SpaceX's mission with his public actions. If he was an employee he would probably be fired, but the issue is that SpaceX can't really fire Musk. There is no good action the company can take. I assume they have privately asked Musk to take actions which harm the company less and I assume that worked as well as when the SEC had Musk agree to pass all tweets through is legal dept. before posting. How to you foster dissent when the major goal that dissent is something which is not actually achievable and would derail the company. I hope this serves as a wakeup call to Musk and he looks at the problems he is causing by his behavior and decides that making life multi-planetary is more important than say calling a rescue diver a pedo or smoking weed on the Joe Rogan show.
At its core we are discussing are situations that are dire enough that a decent fraction of the company feels their leadership is fucking around and hurting the company. Whatever angle we look at it, the company will already be segmented and toxic: it couldn’t stop its leadership from fucking up for whatever length of time, leadership doesn’t give a shit about employees reaction, and managers can’t properly gauge nor progressively address the internal repercussions.
“Focusing on the mission” is already compromised at that point, and you’ll need to chose between the leader that doesn’t give enough shit, or the employees that stepped up too prominently.
Vision maybe. Politics are irrelevant to work. It is impossible to achieve 100% alignment in an organization of more than one person. And even then I'm not sure it is possible.
He even went with him to Russia before SpaceX was founded,
Mike G also started the Space Development Agency, with a goal of funding govt LEO constellations with specifications matching Starlink.
Regardless, businesses don't care what you did in the past - for that, your reward is your compensation - you are hired for what you do tomorrow.
Irrelevant to being hired or kept on as the president of the company by the owners, of which Musk is only 17% (AFAICT). If more owners of the company do not want him as an employee (president, whatever), then they can fire him.
Whether that would be a good idea or not is something else. (Apple 'fired' Jobs in the 1980s.)
Did he attempt to supress the letter?
Freedom of speech != freedom from action
They have the power to work someplace else.
If you have a full pantry, go ahead and bite.
Or live somewhere where you get free food.
No, not really, since this has very little to do with free speech. Free speech does not mean that you can communicate with your superiors, or in fact any other person you're in some relationship with (spouse, family member, etc.), in arbitrary ways with no consequences.
if we want to somehow generalize the ethos of whatever is legal should be allowed (so basically he thinks Twitter is too strict) then we might conclude that he favors more "open dialogue" and this does feel contrary to firing employees for criticism. (though I haven't seen the letter, it's possible the authors/signers explicitly said something that simply make it clear that they won't continue to work in this or that way, and the company decided that okay, the company won't change so they have to go anyway - see the Gebru ultimatum)