That’s not possible. People take offense at everything. Or they will tomorrow.
That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow.
Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
It really isn't changing that much though. Maybe if you think someone might be offended by what you say in 10 years, maybe don't say it now. It's probably offensive now
Has it slowed down? The change over the last 10 years, and over the 10 before that, was fast. Just watching mass media from the early parts of those two spans should make that clear.
I don't think i hold offensive beliefs (controversial maybe, as we see here, but no ones getting their feelings hurt), if I did and learned about I'd change them. It seems easy to not be offensive though, what kind of beliefs are people having trouble with?
There are some issues where it seems impossible to hold a non-offensive belief. You can't support abortion or oppose abortion or claim abortion is unimportant without genuinely hurting a lot of people's feelings. (I wouldn't deny that you can avoid being offensive by simply avoiding all controversial issues, and in some contexts that's a perfectly reasonable approach.)
Your comment offends my intelligence, therefore you've hurt a person, therefore you're not a "good person" anymore.
But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it.
Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
That's an unreasonable standard. If I chose to see your use of the phrase 'clover got you' as some slur against Irish people and was offended, would you have offended me?
This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously.
Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth.
Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
You can't physically hurt people on twitter, as it's all information. So whether or not you hurt someone is (at least partly) dependent on how people react. That can be hard to predict.
