Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how counterspeech influences hate speech repliers on social media, proposing models to predict whether haters will reengage and if their reentry will be hateful, based on a new Reddit dataset.

Contribution

It introduces the ReEco dataset and compares models for predicting hate repliers' reactions to counterspeech, highlighting the effectiveness of a three-way classification approach.

Findings

The 3-way classifier outperforms the two-stage predictor.

Linguistic features reveal differences in counterspeech language.

Most common errors are identified in the best model.

Abstract

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.