Sure, words can't hurt you, but coordinated harassment campaigns can, and, for the mentally feeble, like CWC, words can coax you, over enough time, to act in your worst interests.
Do you think the parents whose child was on the cover of Nat Geo count as a "public internet persona"? Do you think it's right that people should be forced to go into hiding and avoid something as basic as a magazine interview for fear of becoming a target on these sites?
What you're advocating is complete self-censorship for people with views these websites consider targets.
Being on the cover of a major magazine (with an accompanying article) absolutely makes you a public person, and you can't expect people not to criticize your family for doing something that is still controversial.
Right. Also, we're glossing over the fact that it's not just bullying, but swatting, threatening phone calls, contacting employers to seek termination, email spam, sending unpaid-for pizzas, etc. It's not just words.
So the logical response is going to service providers and business partners to get them deplatformed?
>It's not just bullying
Which is already able to be dealt with as harassment, and is defanged in this case in the judicial system most likely under assumption of risk doctrine as a public figure.
>It's swatting
Already illegal, and has metadata trail through which filing a false report can be dealt with.
>threatening phone calls
Jesus. So block or screen them. Should I go running to the police because I'm harassed by marketers all the time? Furthermore, LE has the metadata to deal with that too, and if they tell you they don't, they're lying.
>contacting employers to seek termination
Twitter does a lot of that too. Sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, doesn't it?
>email spam
Should be a capital offense with death penalty viable, but alas, it's email. Ignore it. Or have fun with it, see how big your collection can get. Start seeing how many times things get repeated. Start doing data analysis on it.
>sending unpaid-for pizzas
Correct response: I'm sorry, but I did not order any. I have a bit of a problem with people online trying to troll me. Here's my contact info, here's a codeword/auth mechanism that can be used to authenticate something came from me in the future. Done. Would recommend actually vetting the establishment in question, and if you know you are bringing this to your locality, be responsible and proactively front-run it by going and talking to local places that deliver to you.
>It's not just words.
It totally is. In point of fact, freedom to communicate without someone else deplatforming you is so important, we call it freedom of speech. Nobody else is forcing the person in question to continue feeding the trolls, and it is a poignant point of fact that if they are disturbed by the observations these people are making, it may be worth taking a moment to reorient around their own actions, and to be a bit more self-conscious on what it is they do that may be setting off others in such a way as it does.
But no, continue to regale us all about how there is no other more reasonable, local, and less harmful way to deal with something like this than blasting the Internet, and encouraging the weaponization of the infrastructure at the core of technological advancement for the last 50 or so years.
