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  • Essay / Feminism's Toxic War on Twitter By Michelle Goldberg Summary

    Many of the women Goldberg interviews can agree that "many of the most passionate digital feminists will tell you it's become toxic" (Goldberg 13). In this article, it appears that most of the women interviewed have experienced online bullying and denigration. Of course they will say it's a toxic environment. The women interviewed said they were afraid to write blogs or post articles for fear of being rejected by their ideology and seeing the equivalent of an angry mob appear on their computer screens. Goldberg even states, “Many second-wave feminist groups tore themselves apart by denouncing and ostracizing members who were overly ambitious or who claimed to act as leaders” (Goldberg 14). So even though these feminists try to advocate for women's rights to be equal to men's, they are not allowed to compete with each other to improve themselves. Perhaps Goldberg is telling us that this online movement is not supposed to have a leader, nor a specific feminist who overshadows the others. Women end up denigrating themselves and ruining their reputations. Courtney Martin is quoted in this article as saying, “Some of them are the product of new technologies that create more superficial relationships, and some of them resemble that age-old conundrum of feminism” (Goldberg 14). So perhaps the problems with feminism are older than the actual introduction of social media onto the scene. Goldberg clearly leans towards the negative side of feminism's problems in this article; she mentions some of the good things that have happened thanks to social media. In one of his interviews, there is a statement about how the Internet is a place where people come together and do meaningful things that affect everyone (Goldberg 14). An example mentioned in the article says: "When the breast