Study by ETH and the University of Zurich shows: empathy helps against hateful comments online
Hate comments online are a problem. YOU defame minorities, intimidate them and thereby threaten democracy, just as they prevent the attacked from taking part in a public discussion.
A new study by ETH and the University of Zurich now shows: Hateful comments can be contained if you gain empathy for those affected.
This: If you react to hate speech with an answer, the empathy is achieved with the people affected by the hate speech, can to die means to be motivated to change their behavior.
This was illustrated using an example. For example, a response to an anti-Semitic statement that generates empathy could be: “Your post is very painful for Jews …”.
With this strategy, around a third less racist or xenophobic comments would appear. In addition, such a response significantly increases the likelihood that a hate post will be deleted again, as the message says.
Examined for the study 1350 English-speaking Twitter users who had published racist or xenophobic content. Some of the hate twitterers were assigned to a control group, while the rest were randomly assigned one of three “counterspeech strategies”.
One of them is the marked empathy generating strategy. In addition, the hate comments were responded to either with humor or with an indication of possible consequences.
«The hate tweeters hardly reacted to humorous counterspeech. Even the indication that the station’s family, friends and colleagues also see the station’s hate news did not work, ”the researchers concluded. And this is noteworthy in that both of these strategies are often used by anti-hate speech organizations.
A research team was responsible for the study Dominik Hangartner, ETH professor for policy analysis. Next to the professors Karsten Donnay and Fabrizio Gilardi 13 Master’s students from the ETH Center for Comparative and International Studies from the University of Zurich’s Digital Democracy Lab were also heavily involved in the project.