Why talk back?

At the Dangerous Speech Project, we developed this definition for counterspeech: “any direct response to hateful or harmful speech that seeks to undermine it.” Here it is, deconstructed.  

By “direct response,” we mean speech that is motivated by - and responds in some direct way to - a specific comment that the counterspeaker thinks is hateful or dangerous. Sometimes the response is one-on-one, addressed directly to the original speaker. In other cases, counterspeakers respond directly to the content, but not to the person who posted it, for example by copying a hateful post in another forum, and commenting on it. 

“Hateful” speech is content that is perceived by counterspeakers as expressing hatred. Though they often refer to “hate speech,” we avoid that term since there is no consensus definition for it. “Harmful” speech is meant to capture many forms of harm, including increased willingness to commit violence, for example, and the effects of being deceived by disinformation.

“Undermine” doesn’t necessarily mean changing what the person spreading the harmful speech thinks, says, or does. In fact, most people doing counterspeech are more interested in influencing the audience - all the other people who are watching or listening, who are typically much more numerous than people producing or spreading harmful content. Most ccounterspeakers we have interviewed see the audience as their best chance for having the most impact.  

Though we study counterspeech for the possibility that it makes a favorable contribution to human interactions and norms of discourse and behavior, our definition does not exclude aggressive and even violent responses. That is because it is very difficult to draw such a line, and it would require subjective judgment. In our own research we don’t focus on counterspeech that is violent or vitriolic, as it is unlikely to have a net positive effect.

Counterspeech is different from simply retorting to hateful speech (which is surely an old human habit) since it is associated with the belief that it is constructive: that counterspeech can convince people who have been led astray by bad speech. 

If that is true, replying may be the best way to react to bad and especially false speech, instead of banning or hiding it. That idea was famously offered by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in a 1927 lawsuit called Whitney v. California. 

In a decision upholding the conviction of a California woman who had worked to establish the Communist Labor Party of America, Brandeis declared: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." 

U.S. lawyers often call this the counterspeech doctrine, though Brandeis never used that term. Based on it, the Supreme Court has interpreted the U.S. Constitution’s freedom of expression provision very broadly, making it the most speech-protective national law in the world. 

Hate speech is not a crime. On the contrary, it is a Constitutionally-protected right to speak hatefully in the United States. Therefore U.S. society relies on counterspeech and the rules of employers, schools, and tech companies, not criminal law, to contain hate speech and many other forms of harmful speech. Since most of the largest tech companies are based in the United States, including Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, their leaders and internal policymakers are influenced by U.S. law’s radical understanding of freedom of expression, and by the counterspeech doctrine. 

It’s important to note that Justice Brandeis had no evidence that counterspeech is effective. Online counterspeech provides an important new opportunity to study the various effects of counterspeech - on the people to whom it responds, on the people who observe it, and on online discourse norms.

Both terms are used by researchers, and they are sometimes conflated. We distinguish them this way: counterspeech is a direct response to a specific text or piece of content. By contrast a counternarrative is a challenge to a prevailing idea, usually within a particular community or social group.  

A good example of a counternarrative campaign was inspired by a surge in resentment of refugees in the countries where they were being resettled, especially after the refugee crisis of 2015 in Europe, when more than a million people sought asylum there. In 2017, the International Rescue Committee and YouTube Creators for Change made #MoreThanARefugee, a set of nine videos of conversations with refugees in Jordan, Serbia, Uganda, Greece, and the United States, to help people see refugees as fellow human beings “amidst the harmful narratives perpetuated during the refugee crisis.” The videos are counternarratives, not counterspeech, since they are meant to undermine xenophobic ideas generally and do not respond to specific anti-refugee comments. 

Counternarratives can be useful tools for working against hatred and extremism, but they are not the focus of our work on counterspeech. 

Counterspeakers use a wide variety of attitudes, tones, and techniques, from "radical empathy" (Dylan Marron’s term for his efforts to empathize with people who attacked him) to shaming and derision. We have identified a broad range of communicative strategies in counterspeech, and have written about each of them. In brief summary:

Some counterspeakers try to empathize with people who spread hatred, even with people who have attacked them personally. Other counterspeakers use humor, simply for fun or to gain a larger audience for their anti-hatred messages. Educational comments are used to undermine hateful misinformation, especially in the minds of people who have not yet formed an opinion about the topic. 

We were surprised to find that many counterspeakers amplify the often shocking and offensive content to which they respond. They say they do this to force people to recognize how prevalent bad content is, and to reinforce norms against it. Another very widespread technique is shaming, which often becomes intimidating and even frightening when thousands of people do it together. 

Finally, some counterspeakers seek to punish people for their online comments by reaching into their offline lives, often by trying to get them fired from their jobs or otherwise prevented from working in their fields. Counterspeakers also often combine techniques, as when a group of New Yorkers responded to a video of a lawyer berating a restaurant’s employees and customers for speaking Spanish, by sending a mariachi band to perform in the street outside his apartment building, while onlookers laughed loudly and danced.  “We are countering hate and racism with the sound of music,” said Mark Goldberg, who fundraised for and organized #LatinpartyNYC.

‍Some people counterspeak alone, and others do it in groups. 

Research has shown that there are several advantages to counterspeaking as a group. First, group members have a better chance of organizing their efforts in a way that increases their reach, increasing their likelihood of having a positive impact. Second, in our research on the group #iamhere, we found that members often reported feeling braver and/or more supported responding as part of a group than they did responding alone.

To answer this vital question we must ask: what does it mean for counterspeech to work? must it change someone’s mind or only their behavior? and whose mind or behavior - the person to whom it responds, or someone else? Most counterspeakers we have interviewed say they need not influence the former; their efforts work, in their view, if they positively affect some of the (much larger) audience - the people watching or listening to exchanges of hateful speech and counterspeech.

Scholars have searched for this effect and there is evidence of it. A growing body of research indicates that civil counterspeech can encourage members of the audience to respond in kind. 

In a study on audience perception of newspaper comments, Ziegel and Jost (2020) found that observers who read “factual responses to uncivil comments” were more willing to add their own comments to a thread than those who read the uncivil comments without the accompanying counterspeech. Other studies have also found that counterspeech comments seem to inspire more counterspeech from members of the audience (Molina and Jennings, 2018; Han, Brazeal, and Pennington, 2018; Miškolci et al., 2018). Groups of counterspeakers may be even more effective at influencing the discourse within particular online spaces than those responding by themselves (Friess et al., 2020, Garland et al., 2020). 

Changing the mind or behavior of the original speaker with counterspeech is more difficult than influencing the audience, but not impossible. Megan Phelps-Roper, who was born and raised in the insular, far-right Westboro Baptist Church that her grandfather had founded in the United States, did all she could as a teenager to spread his blistering hatred of homosexuality and gay people, and other vitriol from the church, including in a Twitter account that she started for that purpose. There, strangers’ online counterspeech slowly led her to question her ardent beliefs, until she left Westboro, was excommunicated by her family, and became a counterspeaker against her own former views. 

Factors that can affect whether one-on-one counterspeech exchanges result in changed beliefs and/or behavior include: the proportion of counterspeakers to hateful speakers (Schieb and Preuss, 2016), the tone used by a counterspeaker (Bartlett and Krasodomski-Jones, 2015; Frenett and Dow, 2015; Ziegel et al., 2018), and even the specific characteristics of the people doing the counterspeech – such as their race or their perceived popularity or authority (Munger, 2017; Seering et al., 2017), according to scholars. Phelps-Roper has also offered ideas for changing minds with counterspeech, based on her own experiences on both sides of the encounters, in a TED talk and in her book, Unfollow.

People from many backgrounds counterspeak, for different reasons. Some are galvanized by hateful comments directed personally at them. Among those, the German journalist Hasnain Kazim decided to respond to all such comments at the start of 2016, as a way of modeling democratic discourse with strangers, and keeping such discourse alive despite increasing polarization and xenophobia at the time in Germany. The U.S. actor and writer Dylan Marron wanted to learn about the minds and motivations of the people who sent him vicious messages.

Other counterspeakers have not been targets of hateful speech but are often no less dedicated to responding. They see strangers denigrated and want to do something about it. Those include Logan Smith of @yesyoureracist, the creators of More than Mean, and most of the thousands of people who work in groups such as Sleeping Giants or the #iamhere network. Their compulsion to act stems from a range of convictions: that no one should be targeted because of their identity, that abuse of even one person makes online – and offline – life unpleasant, if not distressing, for many, and that the breakdown of discourse norms online can undermine democratic life. 

Still other counterspeakers are subject experts who set out to correct hateful misinformation, like Kevin Kruse. Most, however, are simply people who choose to respond to hatred and dangerous speech when they see it.

Yes. Some people respond to speech they regard as unacceptable with vitriol, insults, and even threats. Hundreds or even thousands of people sometimes join in, criticizing and publicly shaming someone, and that can be terrifying, especially when they also “dox” their target, which means distributing private information such as their home address.

As researchers, we do not study counterspeech that we regard as harmful (or more harmful than beneficial), since it is unlikely to improve discourse norms and relationships between disparate people (the effects of interest to us). Our definition of counterspeech does include aggressive and even violent responses, since it would be very difficult to craft a definition that would draw the line consistently and objectively.

Also, counterspeakers are sometimes criticized and attacked for what they do. If you are thinking of becoming a counterspeaker, it is very important to learn how to protect yourself before you start.

At the Dangerous Speech Project, we search for effective ways to diminish dangerous speech and hate speech that don’t bring about other harms. One such response might be counterspeech, and it’s vital to study its effects, especially as censorship and takedown proliferate as methods of regulating online speech. Unlike those responses, counterspeech doesn’t rely on removing speech, and it can be practiced by almost anyone.