Police have questioned a 21-year-old man in connection with the torrent of abuse. He has been bailed to a date in mid-September following his arrest in Manchester on suspicion of harassment offences, Scotland Yard said.
On Monday night it emerged that a second MP, Claire Perry, also received death threats relating to her fight against pornography on the internet.
Ms Criado Perez, a freelance journalist, organised a campaign which included a petition signed by more than 35,500 people after the Bank of England decided to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on new £5 banknotes.
Her campaign led to the announcement that Jane Austen would feature on the new £10 note from 2017, but led to a litany of hostile and menacing tweets against her.
Ms Criado Perez described how the online abuse had left her feeling “under siege” and terrified in her own home.
She told BBC2′s Newsnight: “It has consumed my life both physically and emotionally. I’ve not really had much sleep.
“The threats have been so explicit and so graphic that they’ve sort of stuck with me in my head and have really put me in fear, I realised.”
When Miss Creasy spoke out in support, one Twitter user, @rapey1, threatened: “I will rape you tomorrow at 9pm. Shall we meet near your house?”
Another said: “You better watch your back. I’m gonna rape you at 8pm and put the video all over the internet.”
Miss Creasy then showed her own Twitter followers the messages, saying: “You send me a reape threat you morons I will report you to the police and ensure action taken.”
She said: “It is vile, absolutely vile. It’s not about sexual attraction, it’s about power. It is somebody trying to make you frightened. It is about sex as a weapon.
“It’s not just me. Women who speak out in public life, especially if they champion equality, get serious abuse.”
On Monday Twitter bowed to mounting pressure from victims of online abuse, including Miss Creasy, and announced it would introduce a button for reporting insulting comments.
Miss Creasy had called for Twitter to take faster and stronger action against online thugs in the wake of the abuse, criticising the site’s current security policies.
The MP copied the abusive messages to Waltham Forest Police’s Twitter account and said she was making a formal complaint to her local police station.
She said free speech was “incredibly important” but said it did not include the right to threaten people with rape.
“It is important that we do not think that somehow because this is happening online it is any less violent, any less dangerous than if people were shouting or abusing Caroline in the street in this way,” she told BBC Radio 4′s The World At One.
“Twitter needs to be explicit that sexual violence and sexual aggression will not be tolerated as part of their user terms and conditions.
“We can all challenge these people and indeed when this happens to me in other occasions I tend to retweet it so people can say, ‘This is not acceptable’.”
She also urged internet companies such as Twitter to work with police to establish the identity of the abusers and to find out whether they could be a risk offline as well.
Mrs Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, suffered similar abuse. She said: “I am tempted to shut down my Twitter account given the trolling going on, including to me, but that would be giving in.”
One Twitter user wrote: “Please disappear into obscurity and/or alcoholism. Or die, whatever. The main thing is you should f*** off and never return.”
Miss Criado-Perez’s experience prompted more than 60,000 people to sign an online petition calling on Twitter to introduce a button for reporting abuse within every tweet.
The company agreed, saying: “The ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone, and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.
“We don’t comment on individual accounts. However, we have rules which people agree to abide by when they sign up to Twitter.
“We will suspend accounts that once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules. We encourage users to report an account for violation of the Twitter rules by using one of our report forms.”
Senior police officers have privately said they are extremely reluctant to get drawn into the time-consuming and highly sensitive area of trying to police the internet.
Andy Trotter, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ communications advisory group, suggested today that Twitter was not doing enough to combat internet trolls.
“While we do work with them on some matters I think there is a lot more to be done. They need to take responsibility, as do the other platforms, to deal with this at source and make sure these things do not carry on,” he said.
Scotland Yard investigates Twitter rape threats against Stella Creasy MP
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