The crux of the issue is that name calling doesn't particularly help anything. It antagonizes, evokes a response, and makes things worse rather than better. If someone is spouting off problematic things, you should try to report it. Then hopefully nip it in the bud before it gets worse.
And I get that frequently won't get the desired or even appropriate response either.
I think there are a lot of challenges that go with giving the best response.
What is the person actually saying? There's a reason dog whistles exist. They sound like normal things to people who don't understand the undertones. Sometimes we have to have a conversation about what that probably meant. Sometimes we engage in the conversation to see if someone was using a dog whistle or if they meant something else.
Is this person posting in good faith? A lot of the times the same conversational topics are brought up with different framing. Plenty of people on both sides of the conversation were talking about the pet eating claims. I think it's reasonable for someone to ask a good faith question about what the reality is. It's not reasonable to spread the claims as if they were true. Sometimes that's a challenge in itself. Sometimes one person is pretty sure that the question was not asked in good faith, and was just asked to stir the pot, and someone else feels that it was a good faith question.
I don't think there's a perfect line. Good people can make genuine mistakes, and terrible people can be clever about how they frame things so it seems a lot less terrible.
And I think I personally fail even moreso, because I naively think that people can be convinced to be better. Which is almost never the case.
