Reading “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen helped solidify my belief about how social media can be a useful tool for worldwide communication and growth. Chen’s essay tackles how social media connections can reach past internalized biases and, when done correctly, lead to the reevaluation of one’s beliefs. In the essay, he writes about the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, a legal assistant and hyper-religious social media manager for the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, who comes to doubt and eventually abandon the bigoted and hypocritical beliefs of her community through connections she makes with people on social media. One such connection she makes is with a Jewish blogger, David Abitbol, who used kindness and sincerity to get her to open up, then combated her flawed beliefs using scripture as evidence. As Chen writes, “Abitbol asked why Westboro always denounced homosexuality but never mentioned the fact that Leviticus also forbade having sex with a woman who was menstruating” (18). His approach worked so well because rather than coming at her with open hostility, like most people did when they read her controversial posts, he appealed to her as a human, rather than the opposition, and connected with her through a familiar mastery over biblical concepts that she would have understood. Though many of the approaches that people online took to get Megan to change her beliefs failed, a couple managed to succeed, leading to a full one hundred and eighty-degree turn away from her old beliefs. This displays how social media can be an essential tool for combating prejudice, spreading ideas, and having earnest conversations about the different cultures, beliefs, and practices from around the world. Without social media, Megan may have never been confronted about the damage that her radical beliefs were having on people’s lives, or how much hurt she and the church were causing. Her complete transformation from a full advocate for Westboro’s practices to a nonbeliever leads me to believe that, if social media is to be used at all, it is best for it to be used in a way that connects us with people who we would never usually get to connect with, and not as a replacement for personal relationships.