The article says they are claiming to protect you from yourself.
But they are also trying to protect others from you. Just because you want to post videos of beheadings and things doesn't mean others want to accidentally bump into it?
As is common with internet rants, this one goes too far. Words can totally make someone feel unsafe. If you email someone a death threat, that severely impacts that person's sense of safety. And since they don't know how likely you are to turn words into action, that sense of safety is exactly the same as their actual safety (since "safety" is an expression of risk).
I'd have found this a much stronger argument if the author hadn't dismissed words altogether. There's a huge gap between "I know where you live <address> and I'm going to set your house on fire while you sleep" and "I think there are only two genders", and I think the author only has the latter in mind. I think I'd disagree even then, but much less strongly.
The related rhyme, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me" is similarly ridiculous. Words can totally hurt people. People have been driven to suicide, and to warfare, with words.
The author gets close but doesn't connect the final dots. Appeals to dogma and authority are a rhetorical force multiplier, kind of like a DDOS reflection attack where a little bit of data creates a much bigger problem.
People invoke safety for the same reason a thousand years ago people invoked god. It's a religion, it's dogmatically considered good by default and it takes massive effort to argue against it.
Some manipulating jerk can invoke the name of either with a few simple words and anyone who wishes to call them on their moral bankruptcy needs to spend orders of magnitude more words doing so if they are to produce a rebuttal that cannot be trivially dismissed, bogged down or diverted.
And unless we as a society are prepared to punish people for employing these rhetorical tricks it will keep happening.
And FWIW I'm addressing the author's point in general, not in this specific case of a statement made by a company. I'm aware that when companies say safety they usually mean "their safety from the mob or the state or the ambulance chasing lawyers"
"brand safety" is far removed from what they care about and would likely exist without that sphere's input given corporate trust & safety teams' history.
It has certainly negatively polarized people against any form of safety near AI.
But they are also trying to protect others from you. Just because you want to post videos of beheadings and things doesn't mean others want to accidentally bump into it?