Not All Counterhate Tweets Elicit the Same Replies: A Fine-Grained Analysis

Abdullah Albanyan, Ahmed Hassan, Eduardo Blanco


Abstract
Counterhate arguments can effectively fight and limit the spread of hate speech. However, they can also exacerbate the hate, as some people may respond with aggression if they feel threatened or targeted by the counterhate. In this paper, we investigate replies to counterhate arguments beyond whether the reply agrees or disagrees with the counterhate argument. We present a corpus with 2,621 replies to counterhate arguments countering hateful tweets, and annotate them with fine-grained characteristics. We show that (a) half of the replies (51%) to the counterhate arguments disagree with the argument, and (b) this kind of reply often supports the hateful tweet (40%). We also analyze the language of counterhate arguments that elicit certain types of replies. Experimental results show that it is feasible to anticipate the kind of replies a counterhate argument will elicit.
Anthology ID:
2023.starsem-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Alexis Palmer, Jose Camacho-collados
Venue:
*SEM
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
71–88
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.starsem-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.starsem-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdullah Albanyan, Ahmed Hassan, and Eduardo Blanco. 2023. Not All Counterhate Tweets Elicit the Same Replies: A Fine-Grained Analysis. In Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023), pages 71–88, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Not All Counterhate Tweets Elicit the Same Replies: A Fine-Grained Analysis (Albanyan et al., *SEM 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.starsem-1.8.pdf