Just like vaccination in a pandemic, ignoring the Twitter outrage is the safest thing when everybody does it (herd immunity). But currently, very few are doing it and since it is dangerous to the individual (re. vaccine analogy: while they ARE safe, many people BELIEVE them to be dangerous, so the result is the same), nobody wants the be the first. And since you can't know if others will follow your example, it's easy to feel like a guinea pig, so you give in and do the long-term worse thing instead.

But unlike with vaccination, the individual risk is very real and more importantly, you can't use moral arguments to convince the individual to take on personal risk to benefit the group like you can with vaccination (and even that rarely works). Companies, unlike people, are not expected to be moral actors (and I'd argue most have to be by definition immoral). So why would a company, journalist or anyone else that finds themselves the target of an outraged mob (or sees a real risk of that happening) not take all the necessary precautions to protect themselves?