When people lose their jobs over things though, it's different when you're an agent of the state. Kind of like the recent controversy with Ruth Davidson being given an honorary colonel position; when you become an "agent of the state" you lose some of your freedom such as being publicly political while acting in that capacity since if the military becomes the state or the military become political then the citizenry is effectively under a military dictatorship.

As a civil servant, you can lose your job for expressing opinions that go against the values expressed by law or code of conduct in the sense that you couldn't, for example, try and express your freedom of expression when asked to register a marriage of a same-sex couple that you would religiously disagree with since you'd effectively be discriminating against someone on the state's behalf.

Not to mention there are ideas and values that are anti-thesis to a liberal democracy (the old, "why should I be tolerant of your intolerance"). It's easily argued that any sort of overtly fascistic policy should be nearly constitutionally impossible to pass in a system of democracy or vetoed by a minority of dissent.

Hence why people talk about democracy not being about majority, although it is in its most basic form, but about respecting minorities rather than 50 + 1% of the people deciding to disenfranchise and infringe on the values and beliefs of the remaining 50% - 1.

Politicians should have a lot of freedom to freely express any opinion, but just like you can't yell fire in a theatre or bomb at an airport; you shouldn't be able to say things like "let's bring back slavery" or "let's deport all the jews" in a modern democracy as it directly contradicts it.

But I agree with you in a sense, social justice tends to go too far. Some barista makes a politically incorrect joke, gets recorded by someone on her phone and then is publicly shamed, loses their job and potentially ruins their life. That isn't justice since justice is about restoring balance and sometimes retaliation. But you can clearly see the disparity in some of it between the crime commited and the punishment done by the people, which is also an argument against populism in general since this mob mentality does more harm than good and very rarely has solidarity.

This isn't about people being sensitive or being too easily offended. It's simply what happens when you have mob rule. The issues are complicated and thus deserve to be settled on a case by case basis as I doubt one would ever be able to create a general rule that works in all scenarios. A code of conduct on social media is nothing new though, it just doesn't get enforced.