The great god of the mountain is turning grim. The warm, lovable, liberal dawn of the digital era suddenly seems dark and menacing. E-crime is rife, state snooping is everywhere, hate speech and misogyny howl and cackle in the internet slipstream. People are getting hurt.

Such has been the row over Jane Austen at the Bank of England that we might think Caroline Criado-Perez was running her for deputy governor. The campaign was in genteel line of descent from Wollstonecraft and Pankhurst, but the method used – through social media – opened a flank to sex-crazed, anonymous misogynists, one so offensive as to require police attention.

Criado-Perez is the latest victim in an almost daily litany of woe emanating from the once unblemished internet. Last year Lord McAlpine had to fight off untrue viral accusations about his private life. Mary Beard was abused for her looks on television. The Home Office is obsessed with online paedophilia, David Cameron with internet porn, and Panorama with Facebook entries stolen as profiles for dating agencies. And no one seems to pay any tax.

That Austen had to be championed by a feminist website was sad. Her cause became identified with gender representation rather than with her qualities as a novelist. But any "feminist issue" is still treated by the media as the ring-fenced preserve of female commentary. When reporting, reviewing, profiling or debating women, an editor's instinct is to turn for safety to a woman writer. It was near impossible last week to find any male comment on Criado-Perez and trolling (the Independent's Owen Jones excepted). Women are addressed by women much as cricket is addressed by men.

Most men, dare I use the phrase, have little idea what some women experience when they appear in public or express strong opinions. My postbag may contain abuse, but female colleagues experience real vitriol. Nor is this just writers. Last week's treatment of Theresa May for losing weight – attributed to her ambition rather than her health – was appalling. The MP Stella Creasy received rape threats merely for supporting Criado-Perez. The refusal of many able women to engage in public debate – the BBC has a list of refuseniks – may not help their cause. But the misogynist response makes it understandable.

Social media have given such responses not just an audience but a legitimacy, creating a sewer for anonymous prejudice and hate. Twitter may be a harmless pastime for show-offs and voyeurs, but it is crack cocaine for the commentariat. It reduces the soundbite to absurdity. Shouted rants of thesis and antithesis are a pastiche of American shock jocks. But as victims have found, the rants can be every bit as offensive as newspaper libel or harassment.

Fundamentalists ordain that those who "don't like the heat" should stay out of the kitchen. The essence of the internet is the democracy of the air. We are all members of the global village and villagers supposedly enjoy no privacy. Indeed privacy, like accuracy, is said to be an attribute of yesterday's media. Let the market rule, cry the libertarians. Let good servers drive out bad. As for the trolls, they are just hangers-on. Those who eat in celebrity restaurants should not protest at the presence of paparazzi.

A minute's consideration destroys this argument. Like all advantageous inventions, the internet has strengths but also weaknesses, and the latter need regulating. It may be the apotheosis of the word, but no one really believes that "words can never hurt you". Laws on defamation, privacy, harassment and incitement exist for a reason. If they are not enforced, people will take the law into their own hands. Freedom requires courtesy, and courtesy requires rules.

Britain's mass media has just been through an orgy of self-examination with the Leveson report. It was written as if the digital age did not exist, like an inquiry into transportation that stopped with Stephenson's Rocket. The abuse of electronic surveillance by lawyers, businesses, banks, indeed entire governments, seemed to be of no concern to an inquiry that appeared mesmerised by protecting Hugh Grant's private life.

It is no longer enough to dismiss the exhibitionists of Facebook and Twitter as collaborators in their own downfall. What may be acceptable in the confines of a bigots' club is intolerable in any public domain, including that of the web. I may not know how to regulate cyberspace, but I know that such regulation limps far behind the need for it.

Last month's revelations by Edward Snowden showed the full extent of government prying into our electronic lives under cover of "counter-terror". It also showed an alarming political cynicism towards the dangers implied. That a British minister, William Hague, could dismiss them with "the innocent have nothing to fear" shows how much the innocent have to fear.

Digital innovation pretends to offer user choices while striving to curtail them. No sooner are we warned to read the small print and not tick the cookie box, than we are told it makes no difference. "They" know who we are, what we buy and where we go anyway – and will never forget. As Eric Schmidt of Google points out in his book The New Digital Age, our digital footprints are as immutable as our fingerprints. Now we learn that we are vulnerable to drone observation and facial recognition. There is no escaping these demons.

That does not negate all hope of regulating them. Every civilised society has rules for the conduct of free speech. I still find the readiness of platforms to give space to anonymous commentary extraordinary. If I dare to say who I am, why cannot my critics? And what of their "publishers"? As Andy Trotter, of Association of Chief Police Officers, said of the platform providers on Monday: "They can't just set them up and walk away."

Moves by platforms to end anonymity and the progressive demise of internet privacy may diminish the torrent of pseudonymous abuse. So may new editing and security systems. But it is not enough to hope that personalised apps, lock-downs and report buttons will suffice to discipline the millions of words which, in print, are subject to the law.

The internet is a wondrous thing that has changed and liberated people. It also threatens our idea of ourselves as private persons and citizens. It has become a masked ball, whose concealed dancers may be corporations or governments, paedophiles or rapists, weirdos or fools. It must be regulated. This is not a "feminist issue", but we can thank feminism for bringing the threat to the fore.