This 5-year-old Disney star has been receiving death threats.

We officially live in a world where the act of trolling is unleashed on five-year-olds. FIVE-YEAR-OLDS.

Mia Talerico is the actress who plays ‘Charlie’ in the Disney Channel show Good Luck Charlie. She’s five, and as child actors tend to be, she’s also ridiculously sweet and adorable:

Mia has been on Good Luck Charlie since she was about a year old, and her mother maintains an Instagram and Facebook profile for her fans, which up until recently has been filled mostly with messages from little girls.

Until (according to TMZ) she started getting messages like this: “Die Mia! Fucking die in hell! Kill yourself, you deserve to die.” And this: “Yes, kill you stupid bitch,” along with a picture of Mia’s head covered by a bloody fist.

Seriously.

So what changed? Why did little Mia suddenly start getting extreme threats of violence online?

It’s assumed that the timing is no coincidence; last month, Good Luck Charlie made headlines for being the first Disney Channel show to feature a gay couple in one of its storylines. It was fairly innocuous – Charlie had a friend from school come over, and that friend was dropped off by her two mums.

The usual conservative groups expressed thier moral outrage that a loving family was being depicted as including lesbian parents. But that was to be expected.

What wasn’t expected, was the need for the LAPD threat management unit to have to be called in to investigate death threats against five-year-old Mia.

Seriously, world? SERIOUSLY?

Have we really now reached a place where not even a little girl in pigtails can avoid being threatened by dangerous trolls on the Internet?

Those who work in the online world have sadly come to expect a certain level of bullying from anonymous trolls. Here at Mamamia, many of the staff have had to deal with threats of death, rape and violence on numerous occasions. I have no doubt it’s the same for staff at every other online publication.

There are those who say that those kinds of threats are ‘just the price you pay’ for having a public presence.

I call bullshit on those people.

The online world doesn’t have to be a lawless wasteland run by trolls. Trying to exist online shouldn’t mean that you are automatically ‘opening yourself up’ to threats of violence. We don’t accept that standard in the real world and we shouldn’t accept it online.

Because when we brush off shocking threats as just the ‘price we pay’ for existing in the online world, we are accepting that we have to pay that price. We are applying a very dangerous entry fee to the internet.

And when a five-year-old girl is the one being targeted, it becomes all to clear that the price of entry is just too high.