"people are entitled to have opinions about public figures and to voice those opinions" Sure, people are entitled to their opinions, and that is what this is a

"people are entitled to have opinions about public figures and to voice those opinions" Sure, people are entitled to their opinions, and that is what this is all about. The problem here is that someone lost his job because of his opinion. "This is literally how every boycott or other similar action happens." Boycotts are typically about corporate policies, practices, or lobbying. For example, I know people who refuse to shop at Walmart because of the company's anti-unionization efforts. What we saw here is very different. At no point did Mozilla take any kind of anti-gay-marriage position. At no point did Mozilla do anything that was hostile to homosexual employees, users, or people in general. This was a boycott over the CEO's personal beliefs, despite the complete lack of evidence or accusations of him using his position at Mozilla to advance those beliefs. What happened here is that Mozilla's public image was attacked in an effort to punish Eich for his opinion. "What you call "thoughtcrime" has another name: public discourse." No, public discourse involves people calmly stating their views and arguing for those views (e.g. what we are doing right now). It is not public discourse when someone loses their job because of their opinion, all the more so when that opinion has no relevance to their job. It is not public discourse when people band together to ostracize anyone who disagrees with them. Eich was punished for having an opinion that people do not like. He was told that he has no right to be a leader in the tech community because of that opinion, without regard to his contributions to the community, without regard to his behavior in a leadership position at Mozilla. There are only two terms that are appropriate in describing what happened: thoughtcrime and bullying.