Empathy
Some counterspeakers use empathetic language as a tool to change the tone of online discourse. They respond compassionately to those who post hatred, to try to connect with them and make them feel heard and understood. This can help change behavior or even beliefs.
Counterspeakers also use empathetic language to reach out to people who are targeted by hostile speech online, and to establish norms of civil discourse in particular online spaces.
Dylan Marron’s podcast “Conversations with People who Hate Me” exemplifies this approach. On the show, Dylan has conversations with people who have posted hateful things about him on social media, asking them questions about themselves including why they decided to post such speech. Marron’s motto is, “Empathy is not endorsement.”
“Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right?” Marron says in a TED Talk. “It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me.”
Research on empathy in counterspeech suggests that there may be promise in this approach. Hangartner et al (2021) designed a field experiment to test the impact of different tones of counterspeech messages on the behavior of Twitter users who had posted xenophobic or racist messages. They randomly assigned 1,350 users to receive one of three counterspeech treatments (using empathy, warning of consequences, or humor) or to a control group. After the intervention, they tested whether the user deleted past xenophobic tweets and whether they created new xenophobic tweets in the following four weeks, in addition to measuring the “negative sentiment of all tweets” in the four-week follow-up period.
They found that “users assigned to the empathy treatment sent on average 1.3 fewer xenophobic tweets and 91.6 fewer total tweets, and were 8.4 percentage points more likely to delete the original xenophobic tweet.” The other treatments had produced no significant effects.
