Free Speech Fragment

Here is the thing about "suffering consequences" for exercising your free speech. In our society, there are only two real "consequences" for free speech. One is online harassment, which is another issue. The second is the loss of your job.

As certain as death and taxes in the social media age, is the fact that you will lose your job if you make public an act of offensive expression. Whether it's saying something deemed microaggressive and transphobic, or it's flipping off a war memorial in a selfie, the normal and expected fallout is for the transgressor's company to fire them. This is, at best, met with cries of "the idiot deserved it for doing that on Facebook!" At the worst, it is met with enthusiastic approval.

Here's the thing, though: corporations could not care less about the content of their employee's speech, or the appearance of their actions. Corporations fire these people for good PR, plain and simple, end of story. The reason that they do this is because a growing number of people are expressing this enthusiastic approval, or outright demanding this action.

Decades ago, if a multi-billion dollar company fired a salaried employee for saying something offensive, the vast majority of Americans would have decried it as corporate censorship. Now, in a post-Michael Richards world, it's expected. Without this expectation and enthusiastic participation by the public, these things would not happen. Corporations could get no good PR out of firing an employee when censorship itself, regardless of the content of one's speech, was a bad thing.

In a world where losing your job when someone takes offense to what you've said is taken as read, the very real stakes attached to your every word constitutes a chilling and coercive effect on your freedom of speech, without the federal government having to lift a finger. Consider Justine Sacco, who made a tweet deemed offensive before boarding a plane to South Africa, and by the time she landed 11 hours later had become a reviled internet sensation and lost her job. In that case, even the corporation that fired her had nicer things to say about her than the mob demanding her head across Twitter.

Whether or not this is a bad thing to you depends on whether your desire to see someone pay for saying something you didn't like outweighs the danger of allowing and encouraging corporations to destroy lives for PR brownie points.