Counterspeech
The Future of Counterspeech: Effective Framing, Targeting, and Evaluation
October 30, 2024Approaches for strategically countering or providing alternatives to hate speech and extremism online have evolved substantively in the last ten years. Technological advancement and a generation of young activists who have been socialized as digital natives have facilitated a maelstrom of both hate-based extremist content and attempts to counter this material in different guises and ...
Counterspeech: A Literature Review
September 12, 2024Every 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. Only a few studies have attempted to measure the effectiveness of counterspeech directly, and as far as we know, this is the first review of relevant literature. ...
Why They Do It: Counterspeech Theories of Change
September 18, 2023People who do counterspeech almost universally want to reach audiences, not the people spreading harmful speech. Drawing on over 50 interviews with counterspeakers, this paper reports on four primary theories of change as counterspeakers describe them, and discusses the implications of this for researchers. ...
New Models for Deploying Counterspeech: Measuring Behavioral Change and Sentiment Analysis
September 18, 2023The counterterrorism and CVE community has long questioned the effectiveness of counterspeech in countering extremism online. While most evaluation of counterspeech rely on limited reach and engagement metrics, this paper explores two models to better measure behavioral change and sentiment analysis. Conducted via partnerships between Facebook and counter-extremism NGOs, the first model uses A/B testing ...