E.g. people who object to a statement because it might possibly be offensive to another group, despite members of that other group being present and not being offended. Clearly they are doing this out of the same enjoyment of other people's discomfort that you describe.

That said, it's interesting this has come up during a discussion about how the intent behind what someone said is often either misunderstood or discarded.

You are assuming way too much good faith. For every one that does it in earnest there's probably 10 grifters just taking advantage of the situation for their own personal benefit:

The real reason seems to me like virtue-signalling. They don't care whether they're personally offended, as that would require burning social "points" by rocking the boat but potentially getting no outcome out of it (nobody else might agree). It's "safer" to just suck it up than sacrifice social points especially when you're on the lowest ranks.

They also don't know nor care whether the protected class they are worried about is actually going to be offended. Again, rocking the boat and burning social capital for little personal benefit.

This leaves the argument of earning social capital by virtue signaling among like-minded peers. Pick a common issue you already know is popular within your target "market" (racism, sexism, "diversity & inclusion", etc) and raise the problem. This doesn't risk any social capital, after all, people like you won't disagree (for the same reasons) and people that might be on the fence or would like to add nuance wouldn't want to risk their social capital in fear of being labelled a racist/etc. It also transcends the ranks - if anything, a higher-ranking person in the company would risk much more by speaking out than someone on your rank or lower.

This eventually results in a positive feedback loop where everything will become offensive given enough time and those who disagree either comply or get pushed out. That's how you get bullshit like GitHub's "main" branch which helps nobody while continuing to sell services to ICE which you could argue actually hurts minorities.

And therein lies the problem. A subset of people get a benefit from engaging in this behavior. So of course they do it at every opportunity.

You get what you incentivize.

Until the outcome is so frequently a net negative (however slight) in so many cases that the behavior is marginalized to a negligibly small number of people/settings the behavior will persist in enough volume to be worth caring about.

The problem is that a large part of the tech industry nowadays relies on "engagement" aka monetizing user attention for the benefit of advertisers, thus extremely vulnerable to public opinion (the advertisers themselves would engage in this behavior, thus companies that supply them must also conform to it). The entire industry is on thin ice already so it makes sense for everyone to play it safe even though it just reinforces the feedback loop even more.

This is why this behavior is rarely seen in other industries that make the bulk of their money on a tangible output, both because the output is less fungible/replaceable as well as those industries' employees typically having less time to waste engaging in bullshit.

I'm just going by conversations I've had with people in person and online, and assuming that this is broadly reflective of society overall. Don't get me wrong, I am quite sure that there are people who are cancelling people for sadistic pleasure and get a kick out of torturing someone and use hot-button issues to do so. However I cannot imagine this type of person outnumbering those with good-faith concerns at a 10:1 ratio.

Other times, you get the "well it's so very easy to make this small change, it's practically rude (or suspicious) not to" - a completely wrong sentiment for many reasons, but easy to make you look difficult for arguing about.

Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.

American history itself had tons and tons of situation where people risked a lot for saying things - including death. All within the scope you talk about. The time span you talk about include runup to civil war, civil war, reconstruction - all of which were full of political violence.

This also when dueling was the thing. Where men of means were expected to shoot each other over words. If you did not, you was effectively over in that town. And the line between "duel worthy" offense and not could be very thin.

> Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.

Moreover, we are not talking here about legal standard at all. Neither was legal standard EVER. You could legally seek to insult and offend people as much as you wanted. Nobody cared about intent. This is about when people say "you are jerk".

There is threat to free speech, especially with new proposed laws, but it has zero to do with intent vs effect.

You would think we would learn from these examples and make offensive speech more acceptable, rather than less.

I'm not sure how you conflated legality with social acceptance. My arguments center around the later.

Now do European history pre-enlightement.

It was way, way worse. Shit talk the church and the inquisition slows up. Complain about the cut of your grain that the mill takes and the local lord threatens you lest other peasants start complaining.

The acceptance of freedom of speech as a general principal has greatly increased the civility of civilization.

You are certainly correct - unfortunately the people burning the books are not the ones reading or writing them (even if they pretend to do so, with advanced credentials or padded resumes).