[maximusprime]

If you said things to me / my family in person, there is the added threat of violence.

Online, there is no such threat. You could just as easily be a bot spewing hate, as a real human being. And being offended by a bot is pretty irrational.

Online, there is "data". If I know you, or have formed attachment to you via ongoing conversations etc or divulging details about myself, then the data becomes more meaningful and has emotion attached to it. But random data? No point being offended by that.

FWIW If someone I didn't know said that to my wife/mother/etc we'd just ignore them and walk away.

[bigB]

If that person kept coming back again and again with the same or similar comments, would you see the threat, this is what is happening here if you care to actually read the articles

[maximusprime]

I do have sympathy, but I think it's pretty sad to call the 'sexist' card when it's clearly just a case of a troll.

If you ignore him, he'll move on to someone else soon enough. It looks from the article that he wasn't being ignored at all.

[anigbrowl]

If you ignore him, he'll move on to someone else soon enough.

Citation needed. You are assuming the trolling person is moderately rational and will go somewhere else if his selected target isn't yielding sufficient lulz. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to find stories of irrational people who escalate their harassment under such circumstances. Every few weeks there's a news story about some marginal person who loses the plot and goes on a shooting spree, so the risk of escalation is clearly non-zero.

[div]

It's so easy these days to be a raging sexist and play the 'troll' card.