I don't know about you, but that's a poor and weak excuse. Would your be offended If I said that to your wife, daughter, mother in person.
If someone said that to my wife in person I would break their nose, so why should online be any different.
If someone said that to my wife in person I would break their nose, so why should online be any different.
I would be a bit unhappy and would try and get away from the guy, but I wouldn't challenge him on it and try and start an altercation.
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.
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.
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.