I've received more rape threats than I can count. This is a call for kinder online debate

Here's a resolution we could all use for 2014: be kinder, more generous and more humble in our interactions online.

I realize kindness is anathema in most online spaces. And I'm far too cynical to want every corner of the internet filled with cotton-candied compliments and Upworthy-style inspirational tear-jerkers ("They say too many people on Twitter are cruel. Then one tweeter did something amazing, and it'll have you in tears"). But Twitter, in particular, lends itself to ruthless pile-ons, aggression and a kind of holier-than-thou political purism that does little to build movements but much to prop up the status of the accuser. This at-war method of engagement isn't just stymying the growth of important social movements online; it's taking a psychic toll on all of us who are in the fight.

Like nearly everyone who has sat down at a computer, I have often been vindictive, belligerent and ungenerous in my online interactions. I make condescending comments. I impugn peoples' character instead of their work. I have watched gleefully as someone I disliked was on the receiving end of pointed critique.

All of that was especially true when I was a younger blogger, when the internet itself was relatively new. As a young activist, I was motivated by anger at oppression and injustice – and I remain angry, and skeptical of people who think there's something wrong with members of marginalized groups feeling anger. I will never be a drum circle Kumbaya feminist.

But I've also been on the receiving end of online vitriol ranging from hateful comments to outright lies, not just from trolls but from other feminists and progressives. And you can bet it has me reconsidering my own behavior, and how social media platforms might be better leveraged to build instead of destroy.

The internet can be a cathartic place, particularly for a young activist who felt fully armed with her own goodness and livid at the range of wrongs she encountered. It felt good to direct that anger somewhere, and to have an answerable body available to take your shot. Write a letter to the editor complaining about an op-ed you don't like and, at best, you make a Letters section that few actually read. But @ reply the author on Twitter and you not only have a direct line to the person who you feel was wrong, you also have a public line – everyone can see you're taking offense and can join in. You help set the tone for how other readers will interpret the piece and how they'll interact with the writer.

That's a powerful tool – and it's one we should use, but mindfully. Criticizing a piece of work or an idea is fundamental to nearly every arena, from the political to the artistic. Any quest for a better, more just society rests on the premise that something about the status quo is unjust and less than perfect; a social justice movement without robust, sometimes difficult criticism cannot exist.

Neither can a social justice movement without debate. But online, there's a complex dynamic of demands for ideological purity juxtaposed with power structures that privilege some voices over others, and a coldness that comes with the fact that we're all interacting through screens. The internet promised a meritocracy, a better media, a better feminism, a better LGBT rights movement, a better anti-racism, better communities for so many of us who feel like we've never really gotten a seat at the table.

When many of the same hierarchies and biases we see in the "real" world are recreated online, many of us felt betrayed. Some of us were tagged as the betrayers. I suspect nearly all of us could write a laundry list of things we would do differently if we could go back to every blog post, every comment section and every tweet. And we largely turned on each other, pointing fingers at individuals we could hold up as examples of moral failure rather than assessing the systematic and institutional inequities and mechanisms that keep some of us at more of a disadvantage than others.

Part of the problem, especially in the feminist corner of the internet, is that many of us were thrown into the deep end of misogyny and hate and learned quickly that if we wanted to survive we had to toughen up and swing back. I've received more rape threats than I can count, and as Amanda Hess details in this outstanding piece, so have many prominent female writers. I've had stalkers and creeps show up at my school, email my coworkers, post my personal information online, call my cell phone, describe everything I was wearing on a particular day, and encourage my classmates to take surreptitious photos of me or rape me. It's a rare week that goes by where I don't receive some sort of hateful, violent tweet, blog comment or email.

It's not just the feminist twittersphere, of course. Comedian Natasha Leggero makes a tasteless joke about second world war veterans and her Twitter feed is flooded with rape and murder threats, alongside demands for apologies. Justine Sacco made an awful comment about Aids in Africa for which she rightly lost her job, but was also subjected to a Twitter backlash that included rape and death threats, an internationally trending hashtag and one Tweeter showing up to meet her and her father at the airport.

I love Twitter and its direct line to power and its spider web of information-spreading makes it a particularly effective activist tool. I would just like to see it focused more on spreading the good stuff, disseminating targeted and thoughtful calls to action and serving as a repository for shared experience and conversation, rather than a convenient way for a group to target the "bad" individual du jour.

It's worth asking: what do we hope to accomplish on social media platforms? I'm a writer first, albeit one who is informed by feminist theory and social justice activism. I want to share information, interrogate ideas, disseminate good work, question social and cultural structures, build communities of smart progressive people and generally make the world a better place.

The goals are easy to outline. The process is harder. Certainly a kinder sort of activism doesn't mean ignoring harm your community members or supposed comrades are perpetuating. Maybe it means asking: "Is this thing that I'm about to tear apart actually doing significantly more harm than good, or is it simply less than perfect? Is my criticism of it coming from a legitimate concern that it is a harmful thing created by a powerful person or entity? Or am I criticizing it to make it clear that I'm better than someone else? What kind of person am I in real life, and how do I want that reflected online?" These are not questions I always (or even often) ask myself.

In an excellent piece on toxicity in online spaces, blogger Quinnae Moongazer discusses her fear of "stumbling over the Tumblr trip wire and falling into the abyss of 'call-out culture' to be discredited with every slur and slander in the book by the people who I ought to be able to trust the most". She writes about how that fear leads to silence, and how:

We must paradoxically be "oppressed" and yet bear none of the markings of that oppression upon our consciousness; we can never bear baggage or scars; as people of colour we can never show our veil of double consciousness, per W E B DuBois. It feels, sometimes, as if we must arrive fully formed to the world of activism, the perfect agents of change, somehow entirely cognisant of the ever shifting morass of rules and prescribed or proscribed words, phrases, argot, and thought.

And yet, there has to be space to point out harmful words and actions, even when those words and actions come from our allies. There has to be space to disagree and criticize, even vociferously, even the people who should be on our "side". There has to be space to recognize that in a big and diverse world, sometimes there are many "sides" and none of them are perfectly correct. But there is a way to do that while remembering the humanity of the person you're critiquing.

The trolls are never going to stop being trolls. Unrepentant misogynists and racists rarely convert. But when we talk to those folks who might simply disagree but are still within reach, what's the objective?

As a human being, there will always be people I dislike, or whose work I think is bad. The problem with navigating those totally natural feelings online is that you don't have to look these people in the face; you can fire at them without seeing what it looks like when the bullet hits.

In 2014, I'm dedicating my online efforts to building, not tearing down. I'm committing myself to humility, exploration and generosity. I'm trying to act like the writer I want to be.