Behind the Counter: Exploring Motivations and Barriers of Online Counterspeech Writing

Abstract

This study surveyed 458 U.S. participants to investigate motivations and barriers underlying online counterspeech engagement. Each participant responded to three hate speech examples from a set of 900, spanning race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability, and then assessed their own counterspeech in terms of perceived satisfaction, difficulty, and effectiveness. Findings show that being a target of online-hate is a key driver of frequent counterspeech engagement. Motivations and barriers differ across demographic groups, with younger individuals, women, those with higher education levels, and regular witnesses to online-hate being more reluctant to engage due to concerns about public exposure, retaliation, and third-party harassment. These varying factors also shape how individuals view their self-authored counterspeech and the difficulty experienced in writing it. The study introduces a multi-item scale for understanding counterspeech motivation and barriers, provides nuanced insights into factors shaping engagement, and explores willingness to use AI like ChatGPT for counterspeech writing.