It reminds of the crappy jobs I'd work at where management would tell us that discussing salaries was illegal, it's not illegal.
This isn't an 1880s mining town, Apple isn't the only game in town. Workers have options and I doubt Apple employees would honestly struggle to get jobs at other more remote friendly workplaces like Crowdstrike, SalesForce, or even Facebook.
It's one thing to not allow something, it's an entirely different thing to force people to stop discussing something because a massive multinational corporation feels threatened by a few hundred employees.
It is pathetic.
That seems pretty out there.
They were aptly named company towns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#United_States
They have an interesting, and often sordid, history.
It's a poor look.
So you either lay down the internal law or have these indefinite squirrel conversations
It's pleasant when they all quit in "defiance". Makes it easier to get a bonus.
That's fine. This is the equivalent of water-cooler conversations.
Talking about work, that's fine.
It's just the nature of providing a forum/ medium so prone to problems that I would not want to do.
I get it even just as a general response to things that have happened other places. The meta conversation is endless and stuff gets out of hand.
If I were an employer I'd be tempted to "You know what, I'm not gonna moderate or facilitate this stuff getting out of hand. We're here to work right?"