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It’s a familiar feeling: I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed. I see that a friend has linked to a great article about social justice. I’m feeling good about it, and then crashing into the comments comes someone making a string of ignorant and hurtful remarks.

At one point in my life, I’d have jumped right in with my rebuttal.

More often than not, they’d respond with a whole new batch of awfulness, and suddenly I’m pouring out paragraphs and paragraphs trying to make them see how completely wrong-headed their points are, while they’re writing equally long responses that just make me angrier and more frustrated.

Sometimes, I’d feel like I was just fresh off a fight with one person online when I’d come across another terrible statement. Too exhausted to get into it, I’d look away, but be unable to stop stewing over both statements.

I’d end up feeling surrounded by hatred and ignorance – and powerless to fight it all.

Eventually, I realized what a harmful pattern this was for me, and instead, I stopped arguing with people online at all. It was a relief not to be spending hours arguing with people, but the downside was that I often felt helpless and a little guilty.

I do believe that online activism is important, and I’ve seen good things come out of these arguments. By avoiding arguments altogether, I felt like I was admitting I wasn’t tough enough to fight the good fight. I still felt surrounded by hatred and ignorance: The only difference was I wasn’t trying any more.

What I’m trying to do now is think more critically about how and when I engage with people online.

Instead of being driven by my impulses – to dive in or to avoid – I’m asking myself what I’m trying to gain, what my needs are in the situation, and what’s the best way to have a positive impact while taking my own and others’ needs into account.

When I do this, I feel like I’m in control, rather than having my whole day hijacked because someone happened to say something awful in a place where I could see it.

I feel like I’m using my resources well, whether that means saying one thing and then bowing out, sticking with the conversation for a while, or focusing on something else entirely.

Following these principles has helped me feel like my online life can be healthy again. And since online life is such an important part of life in general, I thought I’d share them!

So here are five questions I ask myself to help me decide if an online debate is a smart move – or a terrible one.

1. What Am I Trying to Accomplish?

When you see someone saying something awful online, it’s easy to get so caught up in your outrage that you don’t think about what you’re trying to accomplish in your answer.

There are a lot of reasons to respond to ignorant, prejudiced, and harmful statements, including:

Convincing the person who said it that they’re wrong

Convincing other people reading it that it was wrong

Giving people (both the person who said it and bystanders) a different perspective to think about

Showing support for any marginalized people who feel alienated by the statement

Relieving your own feelings so that you can move on with your day

Any of these can be good reasons – but knowing which ones are most important to you should impact your approach, and also give you a good stopping point (more on that in a minute).

It’s important to remember that heated arguments are often polarizing, leaving each side more convinced that they’re right and the other person is wrong and terrible. This doesn’t mean you should never respond heatedly. If your goal is to show support to others, or relieve your feelings, a heated response may be what gets the job done.

But if your goal is to persuade or educate, you will usually make more progress by showing empathy and respect as you explain why the thing they said was so wrong.

You also want to be realistic about your goals.

If the only way to feel like you’ve succeeded is to have the person who made the statement admit they were wrong, or to have all the other people in the conversation end up agreeing with you, you’ll usually end up feeling frustrated and defeated. Changing minds usually takes many, many conversations, and time for ideas to sink in.

If you can set a goal that is realistic for the situation, like “Make sure my perspective is thoroughly laid out for others to read” or “Let our mutual friends/other readers see that I disagree strongly with this person,” then you can leave feeling like you have accomplished something.

2. What Will This Cost Me?

Online arguments can be sneaky.

Because you have the ability to reply right at your fingertips, and because it’s so fast, it’s easy to completely lose sight of how much it’s costing you.

I know I’m not the only one who’s started in with the intention of just responding briefly, and ended up losing an entire afternoon to the argument.

Even though I was supposedly working or socializing in between replies, most of my attention and focus, for hours on end, were caught up in the argument – thinking of what to say next, stewing in my anger, checking and refreshing to make sure I didn’t miss a response.

There’s a physical and emotional cost as well. I usually leave these arguments exhausted by rage and frustration, and that’s not awesome for my body, my heart, or my relationships.

Working for justice is worth a fair amount of time and stress, but I do want to be deliberate about how I spend those resources.

Using the same amount of time and emotional energy, I could have probably made three or four calls to political representatives, written some activists I admire to express my support, written my own blog post explaining my views, or researched a local injustice that I need to learn more about.

Given how a lot of my online arguments ended, any of those things would have been a more effective use of my time and energy.