Because Elon's twitter friends claim to care about it so much, I guess.

How does the saying go? Something about freedom of speech isn’t freedom from the consequences of your speech? A recurring theme from MrMusk lately, it’s no longer genuine but now a cynical ploy.

No idea, but I remembered when we had to tell people to stop drinking chlorine and they get mad because it was within their "freedom of speech".

The same reason it’s always “for the children”; it sounds good and righteous if you don’t think critically.

Repeat "freedom of speech" enough times, and it stops having its meaning.

So when the authoritarians come to power, you can scream "freedom of speech" all you want - no one will care.

It's a brilliant tactic. It worked in the other direction with "fake news".

Used to mean "actual made up news, usually from Russian proxy 'news' sites". Now the term is completely void of meaning.

When the charge is you should have truth in advertising, the rebuttal of freedom of speech sounds better than lies in advertising.

Well it's not about freedom of speech. It's freedom to tell lies publicly and not be held accountable for it by confusing what class of entity is making the speech. This is just covered by freedom of speech legislation.

Telsa is acting in bad faith towards customers, the government and investors here.

It’s vague and very well protected

Speech isn't entirely unlimited. Saying something that makes people over-trust your "autopilot" and kill other road users seems like a reasonable limit.

As per saying - When you know how to use a hammer, then every problem is looking like a nail.

It seems like a loser argument to me. Free speech has never been a defense for false advertising; I'm not sure why Tesla thinks it will start working now.

This sounds more like PR than like a real legal argument. And maybe that's exactly what's going on. Maybe they're trying to look good in public even if they lose the case.

Lawyers throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

IANAL, but in my opinion this isn't actually a freedom of speech issue, it's a corporate personhood issue. Tesla the company should not have constitutional freedom of speech protections for it's marketing communications.