Wait, parent post is saying to just ignore it. You're saying to report it to police.

Which is right?

Thousands of reports are made to police each year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24160004

> About 2,000 crimes related to online abuse are being reported to the police in London each year, according to new figures.

Over a thousand reach the threshold for court action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502291

> More than 1,700 cases involving abusive messages sent online or via text message reached English and Welsh courts in 2012, the BBC has learned after a Freedom of Information request.

The criado-perez trolls were enabled by the Internet. They saw other people trolling and thought it was okay; they were able to create many accounts rapidly; they were able to send very many messages.

You're discounting the possibility that there's a difference. There's varying levels of harassment, and it should be up to the victim's discretion as to how severely it should be treated. If person A calls person B a jerk on Twitter, that's easily enough ignored (unless there's a pre-existing personal or parasocial relationship between persons A and B that would make "jerk" sting more than it otherwise would), but if person A organizes a campaign involving all of their followers whose sole intent is to make person B feel threatened then that's an entirely different matter.

The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.

It has everything to do with the internet -- fundamentally, the last ten years of online technology are the story of previously borderline behavior types demonstrating emergent properties at scale. The ways in which people are regularly, even commonly, harassed online now are life-destroying. If you think the cops have the resources to follow up on thirty thousand death threats from all over the world you're being willfully naive at best.

> Report it to the police

Since when does that help? http://www.adistantsoil.com/2011/12/18/stalked-someones-watc... http://www.themarysue.com/zoe-quinn-drops-case/