[calibraxis]

> We simply can't imagine what it is like to live in an oppressive system without freedom of speech.

Nice try. Humanity is not so spectacularly unobservant. Most of us are stuck in an "oppressive system without freedom of speech" half the weekday. (With exceptions, like college.) School where we're constantly told to STFU and move from room to room. Great training for corporations in later life. And the US has the biggest prisons; if you're the wrong color or poor, school trains for that with patdowns and metal detectors.

I have to agree with Marc Andreessen who tweeted: "Wouldn't we be shocked and dismayed if the NSA wasn't doing this? What did people think all those billions of dollars of funding were for?"

No, sentences like this are common in propaganda. Not to convince you of untruths, but to convince you that everyone else believes these untruths and that you're weird. In this case, it flatters anyone who knows better.

[bmmayer1]

Why do you assume freedom of speech exists on college campuses?

[jsprogrammer]

It may exist to a greater extent on some college campuses than some corporate campuses.

At college you can choose to work on whichever topic you'd like and discuss it with whomever you would like.

At a corporation, many people are simply told what to do and if they deviate from doing what they were told, are fired and/or treated poorly.

[blumkvist]

Do you really believe this is the same as soviet repression of freedom of speech?

[jsprogrammer]

Sorry, but did I or anyone else here claim to believe that?

I was only trying to explain what the original poster might have meant with their parenthetical.