This may sound weird for a journalist, but tuning individual people out on social media has vastly improved my life over the past year.
I used to be one of those people who refused to ever hit the block button for anyone but an obvious spambot. Knowledge is my business, after all, and you can't learn anything if you just listen to the same old opinions over and over again. You'll never change and your views will never evolve. Something something freedom something.
Then I stepped into the giant hornets' nest that was #GamerGate and I learned a very important thing: You will also never learn or evolve if you continue to read minor variations of John Birch Society propaganda that simply replace the word "communists" with "SJWs."
No really, that happened.
So I started blocking people. First on Twitter. I would tweet something about #GamerGate and one by one ban the people who called me a fag or a hack or the ones who just sent me bizarre and probably illegal hentai porn. Granted, doing so always resulted in being bugged from another account that person maintained for the specific purpose of annoying people who blocked them further. That left the bully one last chance to shout that you simply couldn't handle dissent from your views before being banished once again.
Side note: If you have multiple online personalities used specifically to scream at people, you're probably the problem being addressed.
I can handle a dissenting opinion just fine. I mean, you can say Jon Pertwee was the best Doctor Who and I'll spend as much time as necessary telling you why you're wrong, but it doesn't offend me on a personal level or anything. My wife likes beer, I don't, and our marriage turns happily on without me constantly screaming at her that beer tastes like a pureed wrestling mat.
What I can't handle is someone, say, insisting that the Holocaust didn't happen or that there is some perfectly acceptable, non-sexist reason women don't make up a majority of any significant public or private power structure anywhere in the world.
Seriously, nowhere.
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