The beauty of being a victim is that you can't lose. The attack is real, and you're a victim. Or the stack is false, and you're a victim of that. You accept no responsibility either way.

I didn't condone what he did, but I think you missed the points, which are how quickly people are willing to embrace a lie, even when it's clearly either trolling or satirical, and the increasing tendency to threaten violence as a response.

That's a very serious issue when the number of people who'll do that is as large of a percent of the population as we have now.

I'll offer we need to find a way to address this issue or suffer the inevitable consequences.

So some guy trolled his political opponents on Twitter and got a kick out of all the outraged responses he was getting.

If there's an insight here, then probably: don't use Twitter; or, if you do use Twitter, don't follow people who troll their political opponents for fun; or, if you do follow such people, don't reply or you might end up egging them on.

> a pretty strange and dangerous societal phenomenon

Passing trolling off as journalism? This article amounts to "hey look everyone, I found STUPID PEOPLE!"