Last week, Michelle Goldberg’s incendiary Nation cover story “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” was released online and promptly beelined into the very group it criticized. An examination of the web-based species of organizing that some have taken to calling “Twitter feminism,” Goldberg’s piece presented a narrative of online feminism as a once-robust, supportive community increasingly transforming into a mire of poisonous infighting.

While a handful of established feminist writers lauded Goldberg’s piece as a brave pushback to the viciousness of Twitter call-out culture, for the women who again and again have found their concerns sidelined by liberal mainstream feminism, the article seemed yet another attempt to diminish them. Many pointed out that what Goldberg had flippantly dismissed as toxicity and “trashing” in the feminist Twittersphere could be better thought of as the articulations of marginalized voices attempting to be heard using one of the few public forums available.

As the ongoing debates over unpaid internships and writing for free have evinced, the traditional media world has long been structured to bar those who cannot afford the high cost of jumping through gatekeeping hoops from entry. The idea, then, that Twitter and Tumblr — microblogging platforms that anyone with an internet connection can join — have emerged as more egalitarian alternatives to traditional media does make sense. Wide swaths of online communities have flourished while mainstream media remains inattentive to radical movements; as several people pointed out in response to the Goldberg piece, Twitter has been indispensable for activists seeking to find community and ignite political bases, and operates as a crucial part of “real-life” organizing, not in opposition to it.