Petra Starke: Why does Twitter turn some apparently normal people into vile cyber bullies? Generic Picture for story on Cyber Bulllying. LAST week the Bank of England announced Jane Austen would be the new face of its 10 pound note, and in response, hundreds of people threatened to rape a UK woman. If you haven't been following this story, that sentence won't make any sense. By rights it shouldn't make sense - threatening to rape someone at all, let alone over a new bank note design, is something that just shouldn't ever happen. But when feminist Caroline Criado-Perez's campaign to restore famous female faces to English banknotes was successful last week, that's exactly what happened to her on Twitter. Shortly after the bank's announcement the 28-year-old activist revealed she was being tweeted "up to 50 rape threats an hour," all by male Twitter users apparently upset that a woman had spoken up about something she believed in. She was bombarded with messages like "Everyone jump on the rape train > @CCriadoPerez is conductor"; "Wouldn't mind tying this b*** to my stove. Hey sweetheart, give me a shout when you're ready to be put in your place"; and a stack of others far too horrendous to reprint. Contrary to the usual advice given to people being cyber bullied, which is to "just ignore it," Criado-Perez spoke up about the abuse. I was told by numerous people just to ignore them. After all, we don't feed the trolls, do we?" she wrote for UK newspaper The Independent. But we had just taken on the Bank of England and won. I wasn't going to be silenced by these men. I wasn't going to give them what they wanted. So I started shouting back. Instead of ignoring the hateful messages she retweeted them to her followers, exposing the awful men who had sent them to her, a move which sent the story viral and put it in newspapers all over the world. As a result of Criado-Perez speaking out, a 21-year-old UK man has been arrested over harassment offences in connection with the case, and Twitter has been forced to respond to a more than 40,000 signature strong petition calling for improvements to its system for reporting abuse. Twitter's general manager in the UK, Tony Wang, has since said the social media service is testing the introduction of a "report tweet" button, for users to more easily report bullying and offensive content. It's a long overdue measure for a service which is wide open to abuse. But I wonder how effective it is going to be. I've had my fair share of Twitter trolling - just a few weeks ago one delightful person suggested I should be shot for writing what I thought was a rather cheerful column about the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Not an arts lover, I guess. He didn't use his real name on Twitter, of course (they never do), but he had been foolish enough to use the same distinctive nickname on other websites, which were easily turned up by Google. Within seconds I discovered my bully was a graduate of a prestigious private Adelaide boys' school, had a pretty girlfriend (there were lots of photos) and worked as a solicitor, of all things. When I quietly pointed all this out to him by way of a reply tweet, he very quickly disappeared. I wonder if, by drawing attention to his horrid behaviour, I had made this bloke really think about what he'd done, or if he'd just been too scared of being exposed as a bully to his employer and friends. The thing is, only the most driven weirdo would dream of putting pen to paper to post a note to someone - let alone a stranger - reading "Someone should give you a bullet." It's creepy, sinister, genuinely threatening. And yet every day otherwise sane (we assume) people do this sort of thing on Twitter without giving it a second thought. What's so different about sending someone a death threat through the post as opposed to in a tweet? Why is one considered more worrying or credible than the other? Why should it be this way? The answer is: it shouldn't. Trolls and bullies will always revel in the anonymity that Twitter and services like it provide, but if more people speak up like Criado-Perez, we'll have a better shot at shouting them down.