OUR VIEW: The Wichitan staff believes that interactions on social media can impact your world view and can reshape a person’s ideology. By approaching someone with a different view point than you with kindness instead of anger you can make more of an impact in that person’s life.

Megan Phelps-Roper, former member of Westboro Baptist Church, has experienced the ability to change her world view first hand through her interactions with David Abitbol, founder of the blog Jewlicious.

Phelps-Roper and Abitol began their interactions via Twitter firing scriptures back and forth, but later on Abitbol embraced Phelps-Roper and showed her kindness instead of throwing hate her way. Abitbol even came to places where her family would protest to have conversations with her.

They began to show courtesy to one another and Phelps-Roper’s views started to change. She realized that picketing funerals and camping outside with hate-filled signs such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Katrina” was not the correct way to convert people to christianity. Instead she stood up to her family who had instilled in her the hate filled ideology by leaving her family’s church in 2012 and tried to make a change.

We think that instead of using social media to scare people into having the same ideas you should approach people and have a conversation. Media is used to connect the world not to divide and as we become more connected through technology our communication skills start to slack.

We need to use our tools like social media to have peaceful conversations with people we disagree with and maybe sometimes change their minds for the better.