As for "toxic", the article is referring to things like /r/CoonTown, or brigades like the one that went after Leslie Jones on Twitter a number of years ago. The people behind those already have a platform to speak: The Internet. They're not entitled to space on another platform like Reddit or Twitter, and they're not entitled to force their speech in front of someone else's face.
I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem. The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones and was actually amplified by media covering how bad it was.
My twitter feed doesn’t show mentions by randos, so Jones should have been able to easily filter out at the client. She may have for all I know.
So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces.
It is until it starts to leak.
"I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem."
I honestly cannot see how one can see the incident, and cannot see a problem with thousands of posters telling an African American woman that she's an ape.
"The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones"
That is blaming the victim.
"So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces."
Except they're not.
It doesn't really leak, not until the honeypot gets shut down and the denizens are forced to hangout elsewhere.
Let me clarify. Obviously, thousands of people calling someone an ape is a problem. But one that is easily avoided by disabling twitter replies to your account. So it’s not a problem for anyone that it happens to.
So when I say “I don’t think this is a problem” I mean that it’s not a problem that can’t currently be solved and not worthy of trying to stop the thousand assholes.
It’s not blaming the victim to point out that if you change a setting you save them from pain. It’s not Leslie Jones fault at all that people are jerks. But maybe she didn’t know how to configure twitter. If so, wouldn’t it be a shame that if no one wanted to help her learn for fear of victim blaming?
I equate this as worrying if people are sitting in their living room gossiping about you and saying mean things. Somehow you have the magic ability to listen in. You do and are upset. Certainly you can try to make those people stop being jerks. Or you can stop listening. Or maybe do both.
The problems seem solvable if your goal is to not encounter jerks harassing you online. Since you can filter them out. If your goal is to not have jerks, then definitely not solvable. But that’s a stupid problem to solve through authority. The way you solve jerks is through love and education.