Who’s Responsible When Online Platforms Enable Harassment?

There’s a debate that’s been running on the internet for nearly two decades: when someone gets harassed or hurt online, whose fault is it? The platform’s? The creator who posted the content? The person who chose to read it? This essay argues that the debate itself is the problem — and that keeping it going actually serves the interests of the powerful at the expense of everyone else. The Shell Game When someone runs a coordinated harassment campaign against a creator online — say, organizing dozens of people to mass-report their posts — each individual report looks, to the platform, like normal community moderation. The system processes each one and removes the content. Working as intended. The platform didn’t “do” anything wrong, technically. The harassers used the tools correctly. The creator loses their work, maybe their livelihood. Nobody’s accountable. This isn’t an accident or an edge case. It’s a structural feature. How We Got Here The idea that creators — not platforms — bear…