ArcaMax

Or maybe you're fooling yourself into thinking there are no real people actually reading your tweet. Sometimes, after receiving a particularly vile and angry email, I have responded just for kicks with a very respectful reply. I will acknowledge our obvious disagreement of views, but thank them for their opinion. Nine times out of 10, I have found, the next email I receive sounds like the Dr. Jekyll side of the earlier Mr. Hyde.

What surprises me is how, in a message as civil as the earlier one was crude, they will say something like, "I didn't think you actually read these things."

Right. That, I respond, is what you get for your paranoid distrust of news media, pal.

Why do they write if they don't think anyone will read it? They're not looking for a debate. They're looking for therapy. "Thank you," I sometimes have read at the end of a rambling note, "for letting me vent."

Others remind me of the classic "argument clinic" skit on "Monty Python's Flying Circus": They seem to seek an argument but offer only contradiction, a tiresome obsession of pseudo-intellectuals who have too much time on their hands.

Reaction to the Just Not Sports video has been predictably mixed. Some skeptics have tried, without evidence, to call the tweets fake. But a glance at some of the Internet's uncensored comment strings, especially on sites that specialize in sports or politics, will show you how common such pinhead hate talk can be.

And to the male victimologists who whine that men get harassed online, too (mostly by other men, in my experience), a 2014 Pew study titled "Online Harassment" found that women are nearly four times as likely to be stalked online and twice as likely to be sexually harassed.

And if you happen to be both a woman and a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, your attractiveness to online trolls can surge even higher.

Just ask Michelle Ferrier. She didn't expect her light-hearted yet insightful Daytona Beach News-Journal column about African-American family life to attract many haters, she says. But in 2005, two years into the job, racist hate mail escalated from vulgar jokes to online harassment and death threats against her and her family.

She stood her ground but police, the FBI and packing a pistol in her purse couldn't stop the harassers, she said during a recent Washington speech. In 2009, concern for her family, she says, caused her to leave the newspaper.

Now she's an associate dean at Ohio University's school of communications and a founder of TrollBusters, a support site that calls itself "online pest control for women journalists." That's a battle that women should not have to fight alone.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.