As for the legality of trolling vs making racist statements it ofc differes a bit from country to country. I live in a contry that accepts the UN declaration of human rights so this probably influences my thinking on the matter. Free speech is a human right, and imo should also be a legal right. Being shielded from someone behaving like an asshole is not a human right. I do ofc not think its good when people treat eachother in such a way (whatever their motivations for doing so are) but I do not view it as a matter for the law. At most it can be a matter of breaking some form of ToS for a game/service the people involved are using to talk to eachother.
At risk of getting off the point (which I think was clarified quite neatly by Gray Ghost) and of repeating myself, placing the focus on what is legally permissible is setting the bar pretty low; plus the concept of "free speech" is often misunderstood to mean "I can say what I want where I want" which isn't actually true, and private spaces such as most online venues will set their own codes of conduct to define a minimum acceptable standard of behaviour. In an ideal world, "just because you can it doesn't mean you should" and "don't be a dick" should suffice, but it's not an ideal world. Things are very permissive on the Larian forums IMHO but it's still not a complete free-for-all and people can be uninvited at the moderators' discretion for e.g. being excessively disruptive and so on.
But that is slightly missing the point and actually Mr/s/x Ghost's explanation of what sensitivity readers actually
do was quite enlightening to me: I think the term comes with the risk of a misperception developing, which I admit happened with me, but I can see what they do as being actually very useful. I've seen a number of authors making comments about "if only..." because of stuff they hadn't realised at the time. It's not about being over-earnest (which is IMHO counter-productive), if done well it should make something better without it being at the cost of something else. After all, it isn't a zero sum whatsit.
Edit: and since I managed to push the reply in question to the previous page with my waffling, I shall quote it here in its entirety.
People seem to have a wildly innacurate view of what sensitivity readers are and what they do. But they also seem to have a bizarre view of the creative process. No idea is perfect from the very beginning and it's rarely perfect throughout the process. Writers send books to editors and alpha readers and beta readers to get other people's impressions of their work, to see if they're getting across what they want to get across the way they want to get it across, sensitivity readers are just another version of that. I even have an excellent example.
Brandon Sanderson in his book Mistborn: The Final Empire wanted to write a well-rounded, interesting female protagonist for the book. He succeeded in doing that. But he didn't realize until after things were too far along that all the other main and supporting characters in that book were guys. He as expressed his regret about that fact and wishes he'd noticed sooner so that he could have changed that. Sensitivity readers might have caught that out and thus led to a book more in keeping with his vision and ideals.
Obviously no one wants a creators creative vision to be stamped out, but sensitivity readers job isn't to overrule, it's to point out where a creator's lack of certain lived experiences are causing them to include details that would make their potential audience feel excluded or hurt. They can also point out to creators where their depictions of people unlike them are falling into unintentional cliches and pitfalls, which can lead to those characters being changed in ways that make them more true to life and interesting. And if a creator *wants* to keep those aspects in their work, then in most cases they can, it's not like there's some sort of wide practice of sensitivity readers being able to just demand a change be made or the book won't be printed.
