A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals. I have never even visited the US, and I still support free speech. It's not a uniquely American concept.
As an employee there's things I can not say as a private individual, but I can certainly say those things in one guise or another.
Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.
In the above example, the consequence is of joining a business that redacts my free speech.
Speech with consequences isn't free speech, by definition.
>Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Consequences are a "retaliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Alarmingly, a lot of online dictionaries - at least in English - seem to define the 2,400 year old concept of free speech as the American First amendment. Can anyone who speaks another language see if this misconception has spread to other languages?
I wonder how many people got away with sincerely saying "Hail Satan, that Jesus bloke was an idiot" in the late 17th (or even 19th) century Bible Belt?
Imagine a group that gets together to form a company where they all mutually pledge that “anything goes”. What rights to free speech does that resulting company have? What rights to speech does the New York Times company have?
A company isn't a person, they can have different and discriminatory laws applied to them, rightly or wrongly.
This is sort-of a side-effect of limited liability.
Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.
"Congress shall make no law" means just that. Everything else is something somebody with a specific agenda made up.
And it's hard to not come to a conclusion that corporations, being legal creations of the state distinct from a mere assembly of individuals, cannot have any natural rights, since their very existence is a privilege; the society can attach whatever restrictions it wants to corporate charters, so long as they're uniform.
(Note that there's a separate question of what restrictions are actually a good idea. I would actually argue for the free speech side here, but that's beyond the point; the point is that, for corporations, either way, we're talking about granted privileges, not inherent rights.)
Separately, "Congress shall make no law", interpreted most literally, means that e.g. state legislatures can make such laws. The First Amendment was not incorporated against the states until 1925, so this country has only had federal free speech protections for less than a century.
Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.
That's exactly WHY corporations have limited liability for the individuals in many cases. That's partly WHY corporations exist.
Do your homework before making ideological mistakes that smarter people have thought of hundreds of years ago.
Your comments sound like the type of nonsense that people use to enforce their views on others; which freedom of speech doesn't grant you, though you wish it would.
It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.
And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.
But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.
Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.
Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.
That kind of reduction doesn't work, given that corporations necessarily (and sometimes optionally) impose various limits on the speech of their employees and contractors — NDAs and non-disparagement clauses from them directly; anti-cartel rules, customer data privacy including but not limited to GDPR, and national security letters from legal obligations.
However, contrary to your claim, that violence can also be directed at assets under the control of a corporation and not just the natural persons. Indeed, in many cases, the whole fundamental point of a corporation is that individuals often should not be held responsible for the corporate actions. So, while fines and penalties for non-compliance can be directed against individuals, this is not the norm, and they are usually directed against the corporation itself; if this exceeds the corporate bank account, then in certain jurisdictions it can become a legal obligation to declare bankruptcy at that point as otherwise it becomes “trading while insolvent” which can result in individuals being banned from sitting on a board of directors for a certain period. The very brief introduction I had to corporate law at university called this “piercing the corporate veil”.