20 Things You Can Do Today to Make The World a Better Place

Listen to Alyssa, y’all. (Image via Giphy)

Block a Troll on Twitter

The internet can be an amazing place. You can meet fantastic people, learn about anything you want, and find a platform for your voice. But it can also be a terrifying place. Women are being harassed at an unprecedented rate online. If you’re a professional woman on the internet, or really just anyone expressing an opinion about, sadly, almost anything, you can suddenly find yourself on the receiving end of a lot of abuse. It’s rough, because this whole social media thing? It was originally supposed to be fun.

So practice self-care online. Block a troll on Twitter. You’ll feel better, your internet experience will be a kinder and less stressful one, and honestly, it’s 2017. And you don’t have time to engage with that. It’s easy to get sucked in to the spiral of arguing about issues you care about online. But, honestly, we’ve already seen that there’s an army of trolls out there. You’ve probably also seen the awful links and quotes your friends have retweeted as examples of awful behavior on the part of people with egg avatars. Engage in some preemptive blocking and make sure you don’t see them again.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t feel absolutely free to engage in constructive dialogue online. One of the greatest things about social media is that it allows us to talk to so many different kinds of people, with so many different lived experiences, all at once. That’s great. But we’ve got a lot to do this year, and no one needs to spend his or her limited emotional energy arguing with people in bad faith.