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Defend Your Enemy. A Qualitative Study on Defending Political Opponents Against Hate Speech Online

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Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12259))

Abstract

Both hate speech and disinformation negatively influence the internet’s potential for public deliberation and lead to polarization between political groups. In this paper, we examine the potential of counter speech to bolster public deliberation and reduce polarization. In two focus groups, we interview participants on what motivates them to engage in counter speech in general as well as counter speech favoring political adversaries. Firstly, we find a sharp distinction between participants who avoid engaging with hate speech and participants who actively engage with hate speech in order to combat it. Thus, the most important predictor for counter speech favoring adversaries is an individual’s propensity for counter speech in general. In turn, motivations for counter speech in general are a strong sense of morality, a perception of the internet as an important space for public deliberation, and a sense of responsibility to enforce rules for a fair debate. Many of those participants view their online activitiy as a form of activism. Additionally, individuals engaging in counter speech hope to positively influence not necessarily the hater, but the broader audience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The repo can be found here: (github.com/digitalemuendigkeit/misdoom2020).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Maximilian Geulen and Merten Wothge for their help in developing the research design as well as collecting the data. This research was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia. We would further like to thank the authors of the packages we have used. We used the following packages to create this document: knitr  [49], tidyverse  [45], rmdformats  [4], kableExtra  [50], rmdtemplates  [12], citr  [2].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human-Computer Interaction Center, RWTH Aachen University, Campus Boulevard 57, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Lilian Kojan, Laura Burbach, Martina Ziefle & André Calero Valdez

  2. RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 44, 52052, Aachen, Germany

    Hava Melike Osmanbeyoglu

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  1. Lilian Kojan
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  2. Hava Melike Osmanbeyoglu
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  4. Martina Ziefle
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  5. André Calero Valdez
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Correspondence to André Calero Valdez .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Max van Duijn

  2. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Mike Preuss

  3. School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Viktoria Spaiser

  4. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Frank Takes

  5. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Suzan Verberne

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Kojan, L., Osmanbeyoglu, H.M., Burbach, L., Ziefle, M., Calero Valdez, A. (2020). Defend Your Enemy. A Qualitative Study on Defending Political Opponents Against Hate Speech Online. In: van Duijn, M., Preuss, M., Spaiser, V., Takes, F., Verberne, S. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12259. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_6

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