ABSTRACT
Hateful rhetoric and disinformation are both rampant problems in today’s online world, and it is unclear what solution – if any – may exist. One promising solution is counterspeech, where citizens directly engage with hateful or misleading content to stop it, reduce its consequences, or discourage it. Unfortunately, whether counterspeech is effective is not well understood, and quantifying the effect of counterspeech is incredibly challenging for many reasons, which we discuss in this chapter. Here, we argue that understanding and measuring the potential impact of counterspeech on hateful rhetoric and disinformation is a challenging sociotechnical problem that will require experts from many diverse disciplines to come together to derive interdisciplinary solutions, rather than working on this problem in silos. Recently, there have been many excellent studies trying to understand the effects of counterspeech. Most, but not all, of these studies lack interdisciplinarity and usually fall squarely into one of two methodological categories: qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative studies seek to describe and contextualize complex phenomena and thus can offer unique insight into the human experiences that result from participating in (or being the target of) counterspeech. These studies provide the opportunity for a greater depth of understanding of counterspeech interactions and their effects on society but they are often hyperfocused on a particular context, and their findings may or may not be generalizable beyond that. Quantitative studies, on the other hand, generally offer breadth and broaden the lens of investigation, which provides insight into the bigger picture through mathematical analysis of large-scale observations of the study system as a whole. However, these studies often lack the detail and ground truth offered by a qualitative approach. While these approaches are clearly complementary, they are rarely performed together. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative studies of counterspeech and its efficacy. To this end, we examine two recent counterspeech case studies, one qualitative ethnographic study and one quantitative coming out of mathematics and computer science. We review the takeaways that came from these two studies independently and then discuss the potential insights to be gained from looking at the intersection of these two studies together. The chapter finishes with an exploration of the potential knowledge that can be gained when performing interdisciplinary counterspeech research.
