outlined above. One of them is linked here for anyone interested in perusing something of a rambling introduction and cursory examination. Personally, I go with Thomas Paine here:
The whole point of freedom of speech is to encourage the ongoing exposure, refinement, and promulgation of increasingly superior ideas. Any project which seeks to curtail freedom of speech is a net loser in the medium- and long-term. Imagine if your iPhone was only permitted to process seven out of every eight bits that streamed into its core processor--and that it didn't know which bit would be dropped from the sequence? How on Earth could it do anything approaching productive calculation and processing of information? It would spit out nothing but gibberish--just like humans who are deprived crucial bits of information and perspective.
If you restrict a person's access to information, even if that restriction appears coherent (and even beneficial!) to *someone* in the system, the interruption will invariably lead to diminished understanding for everyone affected.
We're not suited to a central information processing framework, where instructions are handed down From On High. Even in the most autocratic and totatlitarian regimes, humans require a significant measure of personal investment in, and/or understanding of, the REASONS why we must obey directives From On High.
We are not cogs in a machine. We're individual processing units endowed with agency and autonomy; ignore our fundamental nature as free actors, and you'll eventually lose to someone who doesn't ignore such an obvious facet of who and what we are.
Don't compel us--convince us! When you resort to authoritarianism to deal with perceived threats to your position, you do nothing so effectively as confess the weakness of that position. Strong ideas don’t require strong-arm tactics; they’re plenty strong unto themselves.
P.S. - I'm not suggesting that the employee's freedom of speech was infringed upon (Google is not the government so it isn't bound by the same rules). I'm suggesting that it is a mistake-bordering-on-blunderous-folly for a corporation that was literally built on the principle of lubricating information exchange to restrict the free flow of ideas within its own offices.