Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Conversion via Twitter

Conversion via Twitter

This is the New Yorker article on Megan Phelps-Roper - one of the daughters of the former leader of the highly controversial Westboro Baptist Church. It's a very long read so tl:dr - she ran the church's twitter accounts for years and through the platform, she met and began a relationship with a man who gradually persuaded her to challenge her beliefs until she eventually defected from the church. I think it is possibly the rare example of a social network successfully bringing two people with deeply polarizing views together, although it becomes clear that Megan moved more to the middle than the man she met online and eventually she crossed over to his side of the divide entirely. Really, it's just an amazing true story of what we as humans are capable of when we make the effort to engage views different from our own.

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