CEO mass emails employees, telling them which candidates to vote for: 'My coworkers and I are outraged.'

Your CEO can tell you to do a lot of things. They can tell you when to show up to work in the morning and when you can leave. They can dictate what you wear to the office. Some of them even control whether or not you have a lunch break. While it's pretty normal for a CEO to dictate what you do at work, it's more unusual to tell your employees what to do outside of the office.

And yet, thousands of employers from sea to shining sea tell their employees they aren't allowed to post certain things on social media or express certain views publicly if they want to keep working for the company. And whether you like it or not, a company is entitled to do that! 49 out of the 50 states in the United States have at-will employment, which means an employer can fire an employee at any time, for any reason (or no reason at all), and without prior notice, as long as the reason for termination is not illegal. It would be illegal to fire somebody for being from a different country, because National Origin is one of the protected classes in the United States. A Swiftie CEO can fire an employee for posting a tirade on social media about how much they hated Taylor Swift, because being a Swiftie is not a protected class. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true! 

Many Americans don't understand that the 1st Amendment doesn't protect you from getting fired for what you say. It protects you from going to jail for what you say. For example, your boss could fire you if you openly insult his character during a meeting, but he can't send you to jail for that. While he might try to sue you for slander, the case would probably get thrown out due to lack of evidence of harm

We all know that employees are limited by what they can say, lest they lose their jobs, but what about CEOs? Company shareholders are often the only people who can control what CEOs do, as they're the only people who can really force them to step down. They might be the only people who can tell a CEO that it's not a great idea to tell their employees who to vote for, but clearly the shareholders of the company in this story don't care that their CEO told employees to do that, or agree with him doing it.