I agree with the reasoning in this essay.
Taken a bit further, however, it explains why valuing “safety” is extremely dangerous—so dangerous that, in fact, online communities should consciously reject it as a goal.
The problem is that when you make “safety” a goal, you run a very high risk of handing control of your community to the loudest and most insistent performers of offendedness and indignation.
This failure mode might be manageable if the erosion of freedom by safetyism were still merely an accidental and universally regretted effect of trying to have useful norms about politeness. I can remember when that was true, but it is no longer the case.
These days, safetyism is often—even usually—what George Carlin memorably tagged “Fascism masquerading as good manners”. It’s motivated by an active intention to stamp out what the safetyists regard as wrongspeech and badthink, with considerations of safety an increasingly thin pretext.
Whenever that’s true, the kinds of reasonable compromises that used to be possible with honest and well-intentioned safetyists cannot be made any more. The only way to counterprogram against the dishonest kind is radical rejection—telling safetyism that we refuse to be controlled through it.
Yes, this means that enforcing useful norms of politeness becomes more difficult. While this is unfortunate, it is becoming clearer by the day that the only alternative is the death of free speech—and, consequently, the strangulation of rational discourse.
I think this is utterly horrible advice.
I have blogged a detailed response at Against modesty, and for the Fischer set.