You don’t understand what I’m getting at. The internet is not your community. You have no idea if you’re talking to someone that lives next door or across the planet, someone talking in good faith or deliberately repeating negativity, an actual human or a bot. My suggestion is not about how to waste time arguing with anonymous opinions on social media, it’s about how to deal with a flesh and blood person in real life.
Shaming someone on the internet achieves nothing, they can block, ignore, and go about their lives knowing there’s no possible way you could impose consequences for their actions on how they operate. They can easily call your bluff because neither of us know who the other is and even if we did manage to find out, most of us aren’t going to travel somewhere just to escalate a social media beef.
We’re interconnected globally but most of us only have an impact locally. This is where ostracism and isolation work. You should start with an attempt at dialogue, but have enough sense to recognize when irrationality is not naivety but willfull ignorance fueled by selfishness.
Adults have the right to ignore all the learning and experience they’ve acquired, deny the patterns of history, and refuse the aid of humanity to the point their behavior is self-destructive and kill themselves. You can’t force a change on that behavior, you can only isolate it so that when it does self-destruct its impact is negligible. Their boundary of right to self-destruction is when that process heaps repercussions on another who doesn’t want that, especially the most vulnerable who can’t prevent the recklessly selfish person from hurting them.
That behavior is something you can quarantine in person. I could tell the people burning down Ebola hospitals why they shouldn’t handle corpses, but I can’t stop them. If my neighbor drug a corpse home I could sit a reasonable distance from their front door and tell them “enjoy your misery, but step one foot out that door and it’ll be your last”. I can tell some Zionist foot soldier what a piece of shit I think they are online but I’m personally powerless to stop them. I can however put myself between their ideological kin in my town make them afraid to act on their beliefs.
I might not even win, physically or legally, the current regime is not on my side when it comes to suppressing hateful ideology with the threat of or escalation to force. That’s the risk. I’ve gotten my ass beaten trying to convince neo-Nazis they weren’t welcome in our community spaces and I’ve run them out of town when our force was bigger and better equipped. Sometimes that’s been achieved by raising community awareness of what they were trying to do and denying them a place to rally (the Hammerskins wanted to have a music festival, we made sure no venue would host them), sometimes with threat of force (we armed ourselves, didn’t brandish, but put ourselves in front of truckload of white boys harassing the Hispanic families in our neighborhood and made it clear; get the fuck out), and sometimes you just throw hands with bigots in a back alley. There’s no authority to appeal to, they don’t care and their ranks are currently filled with folks who support the cause of the haters anyway.
Internet shame doesn’t work. Occasionally you might find someone worth the effort of responding to. Like me and you. We might disagree on some points of how to deal with the problem, but at least there’s a conversation here worth having even if we don’t end up on the same page. But we can’t directly affect each other’s ability to do anything, it’s all just words. The power to prevent or reduce harm in your community is offline and in person. Don’t abandon the power of the internet to communicate globally, to have good conversations and maybe shape opinions, but recognize its limits and the situations where you actually become the agent of change/protection/prevention.