Television presenter Waleed Aly and wife Susan Carland. Picture: AAP/Dan Himbrechts

Yet it seems academic Susan Carland might be giving her other half a run for his money by taking her own stand on important issues.

The former Muslim Australian of the Year has pledged to donate $1 to Unicef for every hate filled tweet she receives.

So far she has already donated $1000 when she made the pledge three weeks ago. It is not known how much more she has given to the children’s charity since posting her tweet.

“I’m worried that it’s going to slowly send me broke,” Ms Carland told Fairfax acknowledging that speaking out about it has drawn further attention. “I thought, what’s a good thing I can do? What is the complete antithesis of what these people are doing? They are putting so much ugly into the world.”

Ms Carland said she believed social media, in particular Twitter was toxic for women and Muslims.

She believes most of the trolls who spit out their vile tweets are insecure, unhappy people who just want attention.

“Any Muslim certainly seems to attract a lot of hate online. And then being a Muslim woman – and when you’re an unapologetic Muslim woman – you get a lot of hate,” Mrs Carland said.

“They just send out a lot of hate to a lot of people. They are at their core very unhappy people. People who are happy and secure just don’t do this sort of thing – they don’t send out machine guns of hate.”

Before she made the pledge, the Monash University academic had simply muted the haters.

Other times she said she would tweet them back saying “someone needs a hug”.

“Some trolls see being blocked as a badge of honour. The good thing about the mute button is it’s like putting trolls behind a glass wall, and they don’t know, they are just screaming away.”