After a certain point, you've got to get it on your own. Grow up and learn how to use the internet or don't use it at all. Simple. But the "they're just kids" excuse doesn't work in regards to internet safety anymore. I will maintain to the end of time that most teens know more about social networking than most adults, and if they don't, they've had much more instruction on how to use it since their fingers have been able to type.
Sure, but society has to draw a line somewhere about who we treat as children - and thus not entirely responsible for their own actions - and who we treat as adults. Whatever the age of majority is wherever you are, that's when you have to start owning your words and your actions yourself.
With the internet pervading everybody's lives, I can't see how we can draw a line between the internet and IRL and apply different rules to each. We have to be consistent about what we expect from people as part of society. It's going to be messy, and we're going to find people who are technically children who are much more clued-up and responsible than other people who are technically adults; but we made a decision to cut people under 18 a bit more slack, because how else are we going to write laws?
I get that schools and governments and parents are making an effort to define these new boundaries, and I get that if someone isn't paying attention to those boundaries it's on them to some extent. I just can't get behind the idea that, given that we have a valuable and kind-of workable distinction between adults and children in everyday life, we have to suspend that on the web. We give kids a bit of latitude to be dumb, because we all did dumb things when we were supposedly old enough to know better. (Christ, there's terrible teenage poetry of mine archived on some godforsaken poetry USENET group that I wish would go away, and I published that back when my online handle was a ten-digit Compuserve number and I barely understood the concept or the permanence of publication on the internet.)
I think the vile racists posting stuff online deserve to get upbraided by the decent majority, because I think that's how a society ought to deal with hate speech - by disapprobation. I just think when it's vile racist kids we're talking about - however technical or arbitrary the label 'kids' is - that needs to come from, or be addressed to, the people responsible for them, and not mobs of people on the internet.
In some jurisdictions - like mine - the hate speech and the privacy breach are both probably criminal offences, and while I'm not a huge fan of laws restriction freedom of speech I can see both sides of the issue. On balance, then, I'd rather err on the side of caution. I just don't approve of shaming kids in a way that exposes personally identifying information in public.