The online hate speech is proliferating with several organization and countries implementing laws to ban such harmful speech. While these restrictions might reduce the amount of such hateful content, it does so by restricting freedom of speech. Thus, an promising alternative supported by several organizations is to counter such hate speech with more speech. In this paper, We analyze hate speech and the corresponding counters (aka counterspeech) on Twitter. We perform several lexical, linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis on these user accounts and obverse that counter speakers employ several strategies depending on the target community. The hateful accounts express more negative sentiments and are more profane. We also find that the hate tweets by verified accounts have much more virality as compared to a tweet by a non-verified account. While the hate users seem to use words more about envy, hate, negative emotion, swearing terms, ugliness, the counter users use more words related to government, law, leader. We also build a supervised model for classifying the hateful and counterspeech accounts on Twitter and obtain an F-score of 0.77. We also make our dataset public to help advance the research on hate speech.
Silence in response to digital hate carries significant expressive costs as well. When powerful intermediaries rebut demeaning stereotypes (like the Michelle Obama image) and invidious falsehoods (such as holocaust denial), they send a powerful message to readers. Because intermediaries often enjoy respect and a sense of legitimacy, using counterspeech, they can demonstrate what it means to treat others with respect and dignity @cite_9 .
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No longer confined to isolated corners of the web, cyber hate now enjoys a major presence on popular social media sites. The Facebook group “Kill a Jew Day,” for instance, acquired thousands of friends within days of its formation, while YouTube has hosted videos with names like “How to Kill Beaners,” “Execute the Gays,” and “Murder Muslim Scum.” The mainstreaming of cyber hate has the troubling potential to shape public expectations of online discourse. Internet intermediaries have the freedom and influence to seize this defining moment in cyber hate’s history. We believe that a thoughtful and nuanced intermediary-based approach to hate speech can foster respectful online discourse without suppressing valuable expression. To this end, we urge intermediaries to help address cyber hate by adopting accessible and transparent policies that educate users about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens. Intermediaries’ options include challenging hateful speech by responding with counter-speech and empowering community members to enforce norms of digital citizenship.