A literature junior at The University of Texas at Dallas who was frustrated by the toxic rhetoric on social media launched a campaign this summer to engage people in face-to-face conversations about race. “There’s a lot of misinformation on social media. I’ve seen a very rapid increase in followers on social media — I have up to 30,000 on Instagram now. Screens have replaced a lot of it because social media is easy to digest, and it’s a passive experience. If we don’t talk about it, we won’t have empathy for one another, and we won’t move forward together,” Kaniga said.