Most likely, yes. It’s not like it hasn’t been done before.
We had a few companies find themselves on this list, which I used to maintain:
https://community.ardour.org/seo_hall_of_shame
These days, we tend to just delete the spammer account and all content created.
I think you are just talking about Slate.com…
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If this will help suppress the horrific content farm linkbait/ affiliate marketing sites that grow like cancer on search results, I’m all for it.
Out of desperation, I used to work for one of these SEO companies. I was tasked with requesting removal of the their attempts at comment and widget spam from blog owners they’d flooded in the past.
After this became largely futile because the blogs had largely become abandoned or the owners refused, the next “strategy” was paying deadbeat or foreign writers $3 for 100-word “snippets” tenuously related to their clients’ business. Eventually I snapped and said that if we were doing something we’d be afraid to reveal to the search engines, then we probably shouldn’t be doing it. Addtionally, it’d be easy to see that the snippet sites had identical outlink profiles to our inlink profile.
I was fired the next day.
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“The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended”
Well it seems to be having its last stand on VOA’s blog pages.
Somehow I was just reminded of the late 90s, when people would spam me in person, e.g. at the airport: “Hello, do you work with computers? Have you been on the internet yet? I’ve got an opportunity here…” etc. etc. I’m told that the “Computers” section at the bookstore was a bad place for it, but it never happened to me there.
(And I guess it never really went away: as recently as 3 years ago, I had some guy go thru his spiel while I was trying to eat a sandwich. He asked, “are you interested in a challenging opportunity?” I replied “Nah, I’m pretty well set in my ways.”)
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One of the secret provisions of the TPP agreement is that the spammers are allowed to sue these websites for potential lost revenue. True fact, look it up.
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It’s still white hat, because it’s about protecting the usefulness of search, which is how lots of people find stuff they’re interested in. SEOs are trying to promote their uninteresting pages by lying to Google’s robots, while Google’s trying to use robots to find actually interesting pages for humans, and SEOs were making it hard for actual humans to find interesting stuff in between all their spam.
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Does this mean we can punish sites we don’t like by posting links to it in inappropriate fora?
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I hadn’t considered that angle. You have a wonderfully devious mind. 
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first thing i thought while reading. denial of service + identity ‘theft’ = denial of business.
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