Some people abandon all traditional social contracts only to embrace totally new social co tracts and then demand that everyone else embrace then too.

Maybe this is the Aussie in me, but the middle finger as an offensive gesture is so mild I'd be surprised if anyone with access to the wider internet would actually be shocked to see it - let alone a cartoon emoji of it.

It doesn't have anything to do with abandoning tradition and living the edgelord life; the middle finger is firmly up there with "crap" or "bugger" on the "people were using this in ads 15 years ago" end of the offensive spectrum.

Yeah, using a sign designed to cause offence in a very obviously joking and non-personalized manner is not offensive. Anyone taking offense is wound too fucking tight. Maybe if it were somehow historical used to target a certain group of people like certain words, I'd agree. But nothing like that is happening here.

This doesn’t really make sense. The article isn’t flipping you off. It’s an implied fictional website designer flipping off hypothetical impaired users, as a metaphor for what these design decisions might imply if done in earnest. It’s hard to imagine what social contract is being broken here.