Ping, KaikeKumar, AnishaDing, XiaohanRho, Eugenia Ha Rim2025-08-042025-08-042025-06https://hdl.handle.net/10919/136957This 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.application/pdfenIn Copyright (InC)Article - Refereed2025-08-01The author(s)https://doi.org/10.1145/3745769