Shifting the Intent of Comments

Dylan Marron shares an encouraging and open-minded talk on Internet culture and its hostility by leveraging his experience as a digital content creator. The creative is known by millions for his videos and engaging podcasts that deal with complicated issues -- such as transphobia and racism, in approachable ways.

During the talk on Internet culture, Dylan Marron focuses on a form of hate that is extremely common on social media and exclusively contained in the faceless land of the comment section. During his keynote, Dylan engages the audience in an uplifting way, relating examples of his own experience with negative comments and making small jokes to make everyone comfortable with the topic at hand. He ventures to explain some of the more prominent insults he receives online and even gives real examples of targeted online negativity.

Dylan Marron has developed a wildly unorthodox and unexpected coping tactic for insensitive anonymous hate -- one that he will later reimagine in a new podcast, titled 'Conversations with People Who Hate Me.' In the digital creator's signature style, the project seeks to emphasize the often misplaced anger within the comment section. In it, Dylan Maroon phones people that have exhibited hostility and simply asks them 'Why did you write that?'

At the end of this talk on Internet culture, Dylan reveals an important and helpful mantra to go by when confronted with online hate and that is 'Empathy is not Endorsement.' Change is not initiated through fighting back or passively dismissing hostility, but through having an open conversation that gives a humanizing character to the online identity.