But surely it is very different when you can post an endless river of vicious comments in thousands of different places, have those comments searchable by anyone, and then have the world's most trusted search engines compile those comments in a way that suggests that they are the most relevant for a persons name.

And I don't think that anyone could ever have posted an "anonymous editorial" in a paper. Newspaper content is written by staff (or wire services) and letters to the editor are curated.