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Main Authors: Song, Xiaoying, Perez, Sharon Lisseth, Yu, Xinchen, Blanco, Eduardo, Hong, Lingzi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16235
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author Song, Xiaoying
Perez, Sharon Lisseth
Yu, Xinchen
Blanco, Eduardo
Hong, Lingzi
author_facet Song, Xiaoying
Perez, Sharon Lisseth
Yu, Xinchen
Blanco, Eduardo
Hong, Lingzi
contents Hate speech (HS) erodes the inclusiveness of online users and propagates negativity and division. Counterspeech has been recognized as a way to mitigate the harmful consequences. While some research has investigated the impact of user-generated counterspeech on social media platforms, few have examined and modeled haters' reactions toward counterspeech, despite the immediate alteration of haters' attitudes being an important aspect of counterspeech. This study fills the gap by analyzing the impact of counterspeech from the hater's perspective, focusing on whether the counterspeech leads the hater to reenter the conversation and if the reentry is hateful. We compile the Reddit Echoes of Hate dataset (ReEco), which consists of triple-turn conversations featuring haters' reactions, to assess the impact of counterspeech. To predict haters' behaviors, we employ two strategies: a two-stage reaction predictor and a three-way classifier. The linguistic analysis sheds insights on the language of counterspeech to hate eliciting different haters' reactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 3-way classification model outperforms the two-stage reaction predictor, which first predicts reentry and then determines the reentry type. We conclude the study with an assessment showing the most common errors identified by the best-performing model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_16235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech
Song, Xiaoying
Perez, Sharon Lisseth
Yu, Xinchen
Blanco, Eduardo
Hong, Lingzi
Computation and Language
Hate speech (HS) erodes the inclusiveness of online users and propagates negativity and division. Counterspeech has been recognized as a way to mitigate the harmful consequences. While some research has investigated the impact of user-generated counterspeech on social media platforms, few have examined and modeled haters' reactions toward counterspeech, despite the immediate alteration of haters' attitudes being an important aspect of counterspeech. This study fills the gap by analyzing the impact of counterspeech from the hater's perspective, focusing on whether the counterspeech leads the hater to reenter the conversation and if the reentry is hateful. We compile the Reddit Echoes of Hate dataset (ReEco), which consists of triple-turn conversations featuring haters' reactions, to assess the impact of counterspeech. To predict haters' behaviors, we employ two strategies: a two-stage reaction predictor and a three-way classifier. The linguistic analysis sheds insights on the language of counterspeech to hate eliciting different haters' reactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 3-way classification model outperforms the two-stage reaction predictor, which first predicts reentry and then determines the reentry type. We conclude the study with an assessment showing the most common errors identified by the best-performing model.
title Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16235