I think the point is that employees that are taking advantage of free speech within the workplace are forcing others into the debate unwillingly, and this is causing strife and resentment.
If you are at work in an open floor plan just trying to do your job while some of your co-workers are carrying on about whatever, you are pretty much forced to have to listen to it. You are now no longer achieving 100% of what you could be doing because your brain is distracted. That's before you even attempt to participate.
I mean, that reduces to basically anything that distracts me from work. Ideally there are no non-work conversations of any kind happening in an open floor plan office. And even work conversations should be kept to a minimum, and taken to a conference room if there's going to be any length and substance.
Why focus on political speech when it's really any non-work speech that's distracting and should be banned?
But we all know that's impossible to enforce, and we've developed unfortunate but necessary coping mechanisms, like noise-canceling headphones.
Or maybe, y'know, just give up on the open-office concept, which has always been a productivity destroyer. I imagine post-COVID office spaces will be much more conducive to quiet and productivity.
"Free speech is bad because I don't like hearing people talk in an open office" is a really terrible take, and I say that as someone who doesn't like either Facebook's role in far-right politics or people talking in open offices.
Facebook has been remote for most of the year and will continue to be remote until next summer, so this is clearly not the case here since this decision is coming now.
No, cubicle farms are just as annoying when people cluster near your cubicle. People just have no consideration. Take it to the break room and/or water cooler. You're clearly not working anyways, so other than hiding "at your workspace" there's no reason to carry on right there.
Forcing others into debate and spreading conspiracy theories are two different matters. The former impinges on the basic freedom of speech and association for other people, while the latter affects no one's freedoms. The former is a matter of principle, the latter is a subjective judgement.
Unsure what the GP was referring to, but the article suggests that the pressure comes from activists spamming work feeds:
> “What we’ve heard from our employees is that they want the option to join debates on social and political issues, rather than see them unexpectedly in their work feed.” [said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne]
Others have organized to skip work in an act of defiance, affecting colleagues who are not engaged in their political cause:
> a group of employees staged a virtual walkout in early June to protest Facebook’s decision to leave up a post from President Trump about social unrest
Not exactly a "gun to your head" type of forced, but nonetheless these are actions designed to foment a political clash with other employees to engage with certain political causes when they may not want to concern themselves with that at all. What makes this particularly problematic in the workplace is that many employees rely on work feeds and teamwork to earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, so they cannot realistically avoid it.
It is kinda funny to me that FB internally has realized that their feed algorithm is awful, but has enough cognitive dissonance built up to not associate that with the public non-work FB as well.
I applaud the move.