Counterspeech: A Literature Review

Abstract

Every day, internet users encounter hateful and dangerous speech online, and some of them choose to respond directly in order to refute or undermine it. We call this counterspeech. Many of those who have taken on this volunteer effort go about it alone, while others organize into groups to coordinate responses and support each other. Some staff at social platforms have touted counterspeech as a method of reducing online hate, but, like Justice Louis Brandeis, who also opined that the remedy for bad speech is good speech, they don’t cite any evidence for their assertions. This is an effort to bridge that gap by answering what should be a prominent question: what does the scholarly literature have to say about the effectiveness of counterspeech?