Penny Arcade makes a counter-argument (click for the original):

Likewise, from their news post:

The incoherency [of this ad campaign] springs from the fact that the spots themselves insult the target of their message, which might work to attract attention, but the actual payload of the spots isn’t savage enough to kindle any kind of genuine analysis. They’re trying to regulate jerks by being jerks, but they’re not really jerks, so they can’t carry it off. This is the danger of assuming that your opponent is anything like yourself. They need to give their actual hatred of this practice a voice, every moment they were compressed into some subset of themselves, every brutal act, every misshapen poem they were forced to write, and concentrate this into a fragmentary lozenge of spoken power.

No-one responds to this kind of diffuse scolding, least of all young men, least of all from strangers who present themselves as archwizards of prim speech and perfect morality. Bigots and stupid kids speak this way expressly to promulgate the root concepts or to provoke a reaction.  Telling them to “knock it off,” as this campaign hilariously does, is like exposing your belly to these wolves.

I just sent the two of them this:

Tycho and Gabe,

I’m a huge Penny Arcade fan, a geek, a lesbian, and a transgender woman. That last label, not surprisingly, is the one that people are most casual about throwing around and using as a weapon – in a society where ‘gay’ is, at least, rarely used as a serious insult on mainstream TV, “trannies” are still open season. So, as someone who would like to see ‘gay’ or ‘dyke’ or ‘tranny’ eradicated as insults for very selfish reasons, I’ve been mulling over the Think B4 You Speak campaign, even before you posted/comic’ed about it.

I think you’re spot on about whether or not the ads will work.

People are stupid. (Call this an axiom of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.) And the Think B4 You Speak ads are not enough of a slap in the face to penetrate that stupidity. Particularly to, as you say, a demographic not known for empathy. I’m sure a lot of ad execs and organizers were able to slap themselves on the back and feel extremely hip and like they really ‘got it,’ and I wouldn’t even be surprised if these ads tested well with the type of teenagers who are willing to test ads. Yet they’re likely not to be read, let alone processed, by their apparent target demographic.

But what’s the alternative to speaking up? And to asking others to think before they speak?

Again, I’m not disagreeing with anything in your posts, or your comic – the ads probably won’t change many (if any) minds, or much behavior. But as someone who has felt powerless, humiliated, and occasionally been placed in physical danger at the hands of the jackasses that these ads are apparently targeted toward, I’m not sure what bigger ordnance there is to bring. As someone who runs not simply the risk of verbal assault, but of rape and murder, for being who she is, I have to applaud GLSEN for trying to do something.

If one jock, or cheerleader, or “gamer guy,” keeps their mouth shut when an insult might have fallen out, this campaign will have been of some value. I’m not going to say “it will have all been worth it,” whatever huge amounts of money obviously went into the campaign, because maybe there was a better use for those funds. (Hell, I would have been thrilled to see those funds go toward beating the shit out of some of the people I ran into in high school.) (Actually, that’s a great idea… I have a charity to go start.)

On that page, though, I’m wondering what you two think might work better. This isn’t intended as a trick question, or a rhetorical device to trap you into revealing that it was those dastardly kids all along; I’m honestly curious. Because, as much as I want to laugh at the ads and write them off as ridiculous (and, again, you did a brilliant job highlighting why they are ridiculous) I’m having trouble of coming up with something much better. Language rarely changes in quick leaps and jumps, so I’m not sure what else to keep doing but slogging along trying to shift it to someplace less hurtful.

Thanks for your time,
-Rebecca