I am not trivialising threats, just arguing that putting them in context would help solve the issue — a lot more than putting thousands of teenagers in jail just because they didn’t mesure the consequence of their anger.
The way I remember it, trolling started out on usenet as a way to, well, here's probably the best example : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.startrek.te...
I know: That got very real very fast, didn’t it? De-humanising your dissenters can have such strangely overwhelming consequences. I mean, just look at every conversation the original article quotes: death-threats are hardly the worst. That’s why when someone claims (proudly) to have invented the key-word for empowering something like that, I pay attention. I couldn’t find the reference where she did, though.
It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those arguments were openly dismissed.
“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.
That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.