Your parent's point of view is the current extension of political correctness taken to it's extreme. That is to say, the world is steadily being encroached by the idea that not expressly considering a minority in a decision is the same as actively campaigning against them.
Or - and this is taking the opposite polemical position to yours - that designing systems without empathy is reprehensible. I lean more to the latter but that doesn't mean what you claim is entirely false either.
It's not as simple as anyone paints it, and what's more, it's an area where short-term economic incentives are often drastically misaligned with both goals of personal autonomy and, more arguably, long-term success of a community and product.
But unrestrained personal autonomy gets you 4chan. The real problem is trying to flatten the richness of human experience to fit through TweetBook+ (or whatever comes next). No easy answers and the problem ain't going away.
Well, Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that people that don't use their real name are Bad People(tm). (1000 thanks to whoever can conjure up a link to that quote) Personally, that seems like he's attacking anyone that opposes his idea of trying to force people into using real names.
The same can't be said of other systems (Google+, Quora, etc) to my knowledge.
