Oh it's way beyond "social opprobrium". And no, I don't think these two changes are entirely unrelated. Maybe not direct consequences of each other - tolerance of tattoos of course does not directly cause intolerance of free speech - but likely having related causes beyond mere coincidence in time.
I think the related cause is that the people with the tattoos helped build, enlarge, and improve the global telecommunications infrastructure.
But the consequent public shunning is an existing practice grown to the scale of the public being global facilitated by the global telecommunications infrastructure; it's not new and it doesn't stem culturally solely from the people who built the system. It would have been too expensive in the past to know what racist thing somebody said in confidence to a friend before boarding a plane... Now, they can broadcast it worldwide and people globally will have done extended commentary on it amongst each other by the time the plane lands.
But it's not the West Coast folks managing the commentary... They have handed a tool to the world, and this is how the world chooses to use it.
