My advice is to immediately rebrand as gracefully and effectively as possible and use all that activist energy to effect the transition.
They kind of have a point which doesn’t make them right, but they hold all the cards and you will lose this one and regret the wasted bandwidth.
This name is pretty rings rather badly in my ears, though I’m not offended by such things. I’d feel similarly if they had named it “fuck sleep”. I’m not offended by the word “fuck” but I don’t really want to buy products that are named that. Do apps need energy drink names to be successful? I’ve noticed a trend in talking about men’s balls in ads, manscaping, underwater fart jokes. It’s seems so much like idiocracy more then something offensive.
On the other hand a rose is still a rose. So I agree they should probably just rename it. I doubt there would be any major loss from doing so.
We can have lots of lively debate about how to draw the boundaries. But we'll get a lot farther if we can move beyond the two-state absolutism of "allowable everywhere" vs. "outright banned with breath-taking severity."
Freedom of speech means the government won't/can't prosecute you for what you say. It doesn't have anything to do with how companies or private citizens respond to your words.
You're (usually) legally allowed to say you'll fuck my mom but I don't have to bring you over for family dinner.
One could contend that apple's refusal to host this app on it's store is in itself free speech.
Either way, the government jasent gotten involved so nothing here treads on free speech issues.
The First Amendment says this. Freedom of speech is “a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction” [1]. It is broader than the First Amendment, and gave rise to it, though the First Amendment is its most successful codification in the modern world.
A society that shuns those who say “bad” things, even without state action, may not hold true to the values of freedom of speech.
You don't get to choose peoples reaction or the way they view you after you say something. That would be infringing on their right to hold or express opinions about your views.
What's complicated about that?
You say "[we] don't get to choose [people's reactions]", but this is not at all relevant. We're not asking whether their actions are legal or whether we can legally dictate what they think, we're asking whether they're acting ethically.
One is law, the other is a principle.