Perceiving threat and feeling responsible. How severity of hate speech, number of bystanders, and prior reactions of others affect bystanders’ intention to counterargue against hate speech on Facebook

Since platform operators are severely challenged to cope with hate speech on social networking sites, countering by individual users is all the more important. Still, it remains unclear to what extent users’ intention to actually interfere against hate speech is determined by the context and content of hate speech. Drawing from research on bystander intervention online, we conducted an online experiment (n = 304) to explore the effects of severity of hate speech, number of bystanders, and prior reactions of others on Facebook users’ intention to counterargue. Results show that users are less willing to react if the number of bystanders is high, hence providing support for a bystander effect. Also, prior reactions of others lower users’ feeling of responsibility to intervene countering hate speech. However, we demonstrate that the severity of hate speech increases users’ intention to counterargue if they consider it threatening and concurrently feel responsible to act.