I think when we see racists claiming their voice on the internet, we remember, "Oh, yeah — those people who are shamed, isolated, and oppressed in the real world, who find their voice on the internet, some of them are the people we're shaming and isolating for a good reason!"

But we should also remember that the mechanisms of shaming and silencing that we apply to racists are exactly the same mechanisms that have been used to silence people we think deserve a voice and a refuge. The mechanisms are the same. The motivations are the same. The difference is who is right and that isn't something technology can detect.

When we lament our inability to shut up racists, what we're rooting for is more effective mechanisms of control. We wish for ourselves to have the power to decide who can speak and who cannot. But do we really want such effective mechanisms to exist in the world? Do we want each society's elite to have complete ideological control over its citizens? How do ideas spread, then?
By violent revolution? By one society overpowering another and assuming ideological control over its citizens? If ideas can only spread by violence, then violence is the inevitable result.

The alternative is to keep engaging with our fellow humans and trust the direction that history has taken. It's funny: we were a hair's breadth from a reality in which progressives would eagerly assent to this suggestion. An ever-so-slightly-different chain of events would have put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and instead of chastising ourselves for not being sufficiently aggressive and effective censors, we would be celebrating the inevitable progress of tolerance and equality in an open society. Such a huge difference in attitude, and it comes down to a slim and strange victory. Donald Trump and his supporters are a real phenomenon. However, he won the presidency with 46% of the vote, less than John Kerry got when he lost in 2004, less than Al Gore got when he lost in 2008, just 0.4% more than Michael Dukakis got when he got trounced in 1988. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate got less than 47% was in 1992 when Bill Clinton won a three-way race. Also, a lot of the erosion of Hillary Clinton's support came from the left, not only because of her connections to Wall Street but also because even before #MeToo people were starting to realize how awful it was that the establishment Democratic machine, including Hillary Clinton, rallied around Bill Clinton to shame and discredit the women he victimized. (I voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general election. My point is only that her support was eroded from both sides, not by an overall shift rightward.)

I think we're thinking about the visibility of racism and misogyny online all wrong. Racist and misogynistic Twitter trolls are functioning like cell phone videos of police brutality. You can't address a problem when it's plausible to deny that it even exists. Decades ago it was possible for people of good faith to question whether there even existed a significant number of avowed racists in the United States, just like it was possible to believe that police didn't really treat black people differently. Now we know. What Twitter has done is turned on the lights in the GOP kitchen at 2am and proved that yes, there is a cockroach problem. Yes, if you leave that racist garbage in the sink until tomorrow, you are feeding avowed racists.

It's counterintuitive to equate open racism and misogyny on Twitter with cell phone videos of police violence against people of color. One is proudly broadcast. The other is a furtive activity revealed against its will. Their eruption into the public eye functions the same way, though. Twitter racists, by their inability to stay quiet and work in the shadows, are bringing unwelcome scrutiny to a phenomenon that has escaped scrutiny for decades. We can use them just like we use cell phone videos of cops beating black motorists. Now that it's impossible to deny that this stuff exists, people are forced to take sides in a way that they haven't had to take sides in a long, long time.