+ Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
That change sure seems a lot like it's saying "we're now okay with harassment as long as the person you're harassing isn't a member of a protected class". Isn't that then adding abuse-enabling language, not removing it?
With the exception of a couple special exceptions (for federal employment law, these exceptions include age over 40 and veteran status), “protected classes” in US antidiscrimination law (the source of the term) are actually axes of discrimination where everyone is a “member” of one defined by each axis (race, sex, religion—including none, etc.)
So while it is ambiguous exactly what classes are involved (because the set of protected classes varies depending on context and jurisdiction), its pretty clear that the change is not about the person not being member of a protected class, but the basis of the harassment not being an axis that defines such a class.
Sure, but isn't harassment something that should never be okay, not something that should be okay as long as the basis isn't an axis that defines a protected class?
That's not on an axis of protection, so that argument is easier to dismiss as not germane to the code of conduct.
I absolutely understand this discourages people from harassing harassers. This is a good thing. There is a class of harasser who will target people who are socially weak in a given community, because they broke some sort of social norm, and even if they apologized and were punished will follow them around harassing them. The motivation to me frequently seems to be getting sadistic pleasure out of it while wanting to express their sadism in some sort of socially acceptable framework and somehow believe that they have outsmarted the system and are UNTOUCHABLE. If ever called out they will feign injury and go into paroxysms of outage over how DARE we target a concerned community member such as them when this harasser is STILL on the loose in the community and how they're the only one who actually CARES about upholding any sort of morality around here!
The end result though is they make an awful lot of trouble pretty much constantly and will eventually get tempbanned for annoying everybody around them with needless drama. This will usually fill the original harasser with glee that nobody wants to see, but this is really the fault of harasser #2 rather than the community. No code of conduct will ever change this sequence of events from happening, it happens again and again in online communities over and over.
The rain of downvotes on my and your comments are very telling, sadly.