I think you're way more likely to find coworkers that get mad or upset over the advocacy work you did over the weekend than you are to find coworkers mad about you building a drone.
One of these topics seems to have a much higher chance of negatively affecting either you or your coworker in the workplace.
If you're enjoying some watercooler conversation with a coworker, would you prefer them chatting about the drone they built or the door-to-door-campaigning they did for <candidate you despise> 2024, or the protest they were at against <your preferred candidate>?
Even if you're fine discussing advocacy work for a cause you disagree with (like any adult should be), there's also a chance you're going to alienate or upset your coworker by not agreeing or being on "their side".
Talking about building drones doesn't have the high-stakes social stigmas that can have lasting, chilling effects in the workplace that a lot of tangentially-political topics do.
Well, I’m the one who likes fiddling with drones in my free time, so I’d personally be more interested in that discussion! But that’s a different question than which of these conversations should be prohibited by the employer.
For instance, maybe my family has a history of killing wild animals for food. I wouldn’t share our kill shots with my company the same way I would with friends that are interested in hunting. Because I know it’s something a good chunk of people don’t want to see and it’s unnecessary to share.
Now imagine I had a few friends in the office who too supported this. And we went out of our way to not only share pictures of these killings (which are all legal) but started to intimidate people that didn’t like to see them.
And then we go a step further and plan a trip to Africa to hunt lions - all legal and on the up and up. And we share these relentlessly. And we don’t stop there. We post Big-5 trophies and endless shots of venison being butchered.
We also begin to loudly advocate NRA membership for colleagues and use company resources to recruit social events where we all go shooting together. We go further and decide we want THE COMPANY to support our gun rights. We walk out and protest our CEO who “doesn’t have the balls” to take a measly pheasant.
Who wants this?
And your managements only way of reacting to that is banning all potentially political talk? Really? My boss would go "go make a #hunting channel and keep it there". And I presume if I tried to get him into gun rights activism the response would be "no, stop pestering us about it", repeated more firmly and with consequences if I kept it up.
