the buttons are there to be pushed

«Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons are there to be pushed - students and activists claiming the right to not hear things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them. Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measures speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate. And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best - the work of Alice Munro, for example - invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.»

The end of the end of the earth, Jonathan Franzen