ther Side is “right” but that they likely have real reasons to feel that way

Don’t try to “win.”

When you hear someone cite “facts”

As

Because refusing to truly understand those who disagree with you is intellectual laziness and worse, is usually worse than what you’re accusing the Other Side of doing.

But I’d like to go a step further. We should all enter every issue with the very real possibility that we might be wrong this time.

The solution is, as deBoer says, “You have to be willing to sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you.” In other words, you have to recognize that the Other Side is made of actual people.

true

Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s

urious person and participate in social media in this way. We cannot consider ourselves “empathetic” only to turn around and belittle those who don’t agree with us.

he misinformation is so rampant that the Washington Post stopped publishing its internet fact-checking column because people didn’t seem to care if stuff was true.

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It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views.

genuine intellectual curiosity is the sharing

“political correctness”

“Hey, that person who tweets about the TV shows I like also dislikes injustice,” which over time becomes “I can identify an ally by the TV shows they like.” The fact that you can mine a Rihanna video for political content becomes, in that vague internety way, the sense that people who don’t see political content in Rihanna’s music aren’t on your side.

When someone communicates that they are not “on our side” our first reaction is to run away or dismiss them as stupid.

To be sure, there are hateful, racist, people not worthy of the small amount of electricity it takes just one of your synapses to fire.

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Controversial Opinion

But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this.

Note: this post was originally published on Medium, where it received more than 3.5 million reads and selected as one of the best Medium posts of the decade.]