It is wild talking to people online where you'll be like "Hey, you're kind of being an ass," and they'll rant about how as a member of a marginalized community... oppression and violence... societal forces... lack of opportunity... and it's like "Ok, people who share some demographic with you are pushed into homelessness and sex work but they are not being assholes online. You are a grad student at Reed who works part-time as a paralegal and you are a real dick."
Genuinely one of the worst things to happen to online discourse in the past 15 years was the popularization - and thus the chronic watering down - of the term tone policing. Originally, it was coined by Black women to describe the tendency of privileged white women, when called out by WOC, to attack the way they'd spoken as a means of diverting from the substance of what was said: a literal DARVO tactic. It pointed out a specific, extant pattern of white women weaponizing their discomfort to stave off accountability and how WOC in general and Black women in particular were thus expected to speak with a servile sort of gentleness, not just as a matter of course, but particularly in situations that merited anything but. What it soon became, however, was a catch-all justification for marginalized people to act like fucking assholes.
People started saying the most aggro, edgelord shit at the drop of a hat, and if anyone pointed out how shitty it was, the culprit would immediately turn around and claim they were being tone policed. The levels of toxicity this resulted in were through the fucking roof, and the result was multiple left-wing online communities fostering the presence of utterly vile trolls because any attempt to curtail them was met with a combination of defensive retreat into marginalization ("Oh, so [members of X marginalized group] aren't allowed to be angry?" "You wouldn't blink an EYE if a cishet white man said the same thing!") and a lambasting dogpile on whoever had dared to point out their bad behaviour. This reached a fever-pitch in around 2014, at which point a bunch of shit happened that collapsed the established troll ecosystems across various online fronts. Since then, things have calmed down somewhat, but the impulse towards treating "hey, stop being an asshole" as a species of microaggression remained, such that it has now metastasized into - or at least significantly contributed to - the "UWU I am a Smol Bean 26yo minor and therefore I can't be held accountable for anything I say or do because I'm PRACTICALLY a CHILD" phenomenon. At base, what all this bullshit ultimately reflects is the desire of a certain type of person to act like an asshole without consequence, which in left-wing spaces is achieved one of two ways: either by situating their target as having more privilege than them, such that they're fair game to abuse (because if they don't take the personal attacks or scathing denunciations of the entire category of person to which they belong in "good humour," then they're proving themselves to be one of the bad ones); or by situating themselves as having a unique right to never ever be criticized or held to account (because they're marginalized or disabled or having a mental health crisis or a MINOR, YOU GUYS and making them feel bad about the shitty things they said is basically abusive).
