A Toronto man named Gregory Alan Elliott was arrested and charged two years ago with criminal harassment for threatening messages he allegedly sent to women via Twitter. His case finally began in a Toronto court yesterday. If convicted, he could face jail time.

It's a heartening development for women whose professional and personal lives are heavily taxed by the specter of online abuse. Traditional law enforcement channels (not always on the cutting edge of new social media technology) often don't take internet-based harassment seriously, because it seems to exist only in an intangible playground and because our culture's "boys will be boys"/"don't feed the trolls" apologia is so aggressive. The line where online attacks cross over into real-life danger is muddy and ill-defined for most people—even, quite often, victims themselves. Is this real? Am I being oversensitive? Am I installing an alarm system in my house because some 13-year-old boy in Ohio is bored? How many rape threats is too many? Should I get a dog? Should I tell people why I got a dog?

Elliott was reportedly arrested after a woman claimed he repeatedly contacted her on Twitter in a manner that caused her to feel afraid, and "continued doing so even after she asked him to stop." After she came forward, several other women spoke up and said that they had also been harassed by Elliott . . . .

Elliott's case echoes yesterday's conviction of two UK-based internet trolls who sent threatening messages to journalist and activist Caroline Criado-Perez. The pair pleaded guilty to sending "menacing" tweets "over a public communications network."

Regardless of your stance on prosecuting online hate speech and/or explicit threats, we, as a society, need to start accepting the fact that the internet is real. The internet is not a fantasyland without consequences—it's a real place of real joy and real danger where real flesh-and-blood people exchange real ideas and real threats. Figuring out how to regulate that (especially in America, a nation with freedom of speech built so deeply into its fundament) is going to be a long, messy road.