Confronting internet harassment

Particularly for women, the abuse can be rather shocking:

The social environment seems particularly charged for women covering issues where men feel superior (sports) or emotions run high (politics). Laurie Penny, columnist for The Independent newspaper in London, recently wrote that for women, having an opinion is the “short skirt” of the Internet. “Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.” 

It's rather disgusting, some of the vitriolic remarks one finds in internet comment threads. Stephen Fry has often said that, if looking at a webpage, he never lets his eyes drop to the bottom of the screen, because he becomes "so fantastically upset by people who write comments." Particularly if it's YouTube; that site's almost like the primary dwelling of inanity and, when things get contentious, nastiness.