Nature News

How to respond to hate speech without fuelling it further

Psychologist Mirta Galesic discusses an increase in hateful comments online, and the science-backed way to react.

By 

• Dhruv Shenai

Is society losing the fight against hate speech? 

Hate speech — discourse that attacks a person or group on the basis of their inherent characteristics or identity — is on the rise worldwide. It can be triggered by various events, from elections and migrant crises to this year’s men’s football World Cup. Posts that were hostile to people of South Asian origin in the United States rose by 240% on the social-media platform X between January 2024 and June this year.

Hateful discourse can widen social divisions, instill ‘us versus them’ narratives and increase political polarization. Divisive rhetoric is also being exacerbated by content generated by artificial-intelligence models and bot accounts.

Scientists are keen to understand these phenomena so that they can find the most effective ways to counter them. Mirta Galesic, a co-leader of the research group Collective Minds at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, studies hate speech and anti-hate speech, called counterspeech. Galesic talks to Nature about strategies to tackle hateful discourse online.

Why is it an important time to study hate speech?

In some countries, polarization is quite prominent — especially ‘affective polarization’, when individuals dislike people who have different political opinions to their own. Rising inequality, shifts in power, armed conflicts and institutions not working as well as they were before create uncertainty. The accumulation of this uncertainty is easily channelled into hate towards particular groups of people.

And given how easy it is to lead people into thinking the worst about others — especially now, by using AI tools to create fake photos and videos — I would say that it’s extremely important to study hate speech. Everyone should be able to recognize their own susceptibility to be manipulated.

How do you research hate speech?

My colleagues and I analysed more than one million posts made between January 2015 and December 2018 on the social-media site Twitter (now known as X). These posts were responses to roughly 130,000 posts by German news organizations, journalists, bloggers and politicians. This time period started with what is sometimes referred to as the ‘migrant crisis’ in Germany, when more than one million refugees and asylum seekers moved there after a policy change allowed them to apply to stay in the nation from Germany, rather than from the first European Union country they arrived in.

In subsequent studies, we used large language models to measure hate in conversations. We also categorized numerous ways in which posters responded to each other and identified which strategies were most effective at countering hate.

What did you find were the best ways to counter hate?

If you see hate speech online, take it almost as your duty to disagree. You just say ‘I disagree’. Don’t feel pressured to have an elaborate argument. Just express your dissent — not to change the mind of the commenter, but to show people that others have a different opinion.

Next, ask friends to join and say that they also disagree.

Lastly, if you encounter a person who has an opinion that is different to yours, don’t cut them off. Try to learn more about them and find out what you share with them. You will be able to get through to them more easily after that.

Often, people are in situations in which it’s easy to encounter extreme examples online, and feelings of unease and fear can be amplified in online spaces. Humans are very social beings. We align ourselves to our environment. The more something is discussed, the more extreme people’s opinions tend to become. That’s why just showing up and saying ‘I disagree’ is so important.

Where does hate speech come from?

It is especially prone to arise when people discuss beliefs that are central to their identity in some way. If you imagine a person’s belief system as a network, there are some characteristics that are important to them — for example, I'm a scientist, a woman and a Croatian. If somebody says ‘science is stupid, we should defund it,’ it might threaten my self-value as a scientist. I would then feel compelled to respond.The rise in hate speech online partly comes from the fact that social media offers many possibilities to discuss beliefs that are central to people’s identity. Also, platforms encourage people to discuss things that they get emotional about. Emotion and strong opinions often receive a lot of engagement, so these topics are amplified by algorithms and become normalized online.

Did your upbringing in Croatia, previously a part of Yugoslavia, influence your research?

I saw the sudden collapse of society. Yugoslavia was very multicultural. Somehow it was easy for particular politicians to engage people in an ‘us versus them’ dynamic. When somebody tells you, ‘Look, this other group next door are going to eliminate you,’ it might feel like your best bet is to homogenize your group, purge anyone who could be a traitor and unite behind a leader. 

I realized then that group identity is more powerful than reason and facts. We need to keep on working to educate ourselves and better understand triggers related to identity, and the ways in which they can be used to manipulate people’s opinion.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03058-3