Yes...actually they are. That's what a trigger warning is.
It's insisting that a declaration be given in advance to remove someone from the possibility of having to cope with something uncomfortable.
A safe space is an echo chamber.
If we really want to know the cause of these tendencies, we need only look to the internet. You used to need to find a group of people to hang out with in your area and in doing so you'd associate with the social norms of that group, whatever they may be.
Now you craft your friend's list on Facebook with people who agree with you and reinforce you. If you've ever clicked the "unfollow" button you're guilty of this. This reinforcement leads to an echo chamber.
As a culture, we're effectively putting canvasing over logic and reason in all areas. That's essentially what you get from a social feed that reinforces your views - constant news that agrees with you...which is just canvasing yourself.
Canvasing feeds on feelings and reaction over reason. You look at just about any socially convenient topic and you'll see this. Just as an example, let's look at diversity in tech since this is Hacker News.
We're more than willing to accost the entire industry for lack of diversity as if it's somehow their fault. Yet most of these companies are falling all over themselves to hire people and we aren't hearing stories about discrimination or people not getting jobs...we just see the numbers and assume something is wrong.
We're not allowed to consider that people might tend to just be wired a certain way. Men's brains work differently than women's. Certain problems might be interesting to certain types of people and not to other.
Instead we create a cause and a problem that must be fixed immediately. We look at it from an emotional perspective rather than looking at all of the factors involved to just see if it happens to just be a general tendency or a real problem.
A problem is more marketable...so we go with that instead.