Multiple times each day, Dylan Marron opens his phone and reads a hate message. It might be about his voice, or his support for Black Lives Matter, or his sexual orientation. No matter the subject, a personal attack from a stranger always feels terrible. “You feel like total shit, that a human thinks this about you,” says Dylan Marron, creator of videos like “Every Single Word”, which cuts movies down to the words spoken by actors of color, and “Sitting in Bathrooms With Trans People”. “A message like, ‘You’re the reason this country is dividing itself’—you start thinking, what if they’re right?” Given the perennial watchword “don’t feed the trolls”, most people don’t even respond to their harasser, let alone call them on the phone—but that’s exactly what Marron did.
After receiving that Facebook private message in October 2016, he spent an hour on the phone with Josh, an 18-year-old who had also written that Marron’s opinions were “awful” and that “being…
