Abstract
Online hate speech is very common. This is problematic as degrading social groups can traumatize targets, evoke stress, and depression. Since no reaction of others could suggest the acceptability of hate speech, bystander intervention is essential. However, it is unclear when and how minorities react to hate speech. Drawing from social identity theory and research on in-group intervention, we inquire how Islamophobic online hate speech and counter speech by majority or minority members shape Muslims’ willingness to intervene. Thus, in an online experiment ( N = 362), we varied the presence of Islamophobic online hate speech and counter speech by a (non-) Muslim. Results showed that Islamophobic online hate speech led to a perceived religious identity threat which, in turn, increased the personal responsibility to intervene and resulted in higher intentions to utter factual counter speech. In addition, counter speech by both majority and minority members directly reduced Muslims’ intentions to counterargue hatefully.
Highlights
A treatment check revealed that the degree of severity was estimated to be clearly higher and above the scale midpoint for the Islamophobic online hate speech (M = 4.11, SD = 0.97) compared to the baseline comment in the control group, which was perceived as fairly neutral (M = 3.01, SD = 1.20), t(118.590) = –7.53, p < .001, d = 1.07
The goal of this study was to investigate how Muslim minority members react to Islamophobic online hate speech and whether previously expressed online counter speech by majority or other minority members affects these processes
Results showed that the confrontation with Islamophobic online hate speech can motivate Muslim in-group bystanders to engage in online counter speech
Summary
Because no reaction to hateful statements could suggest its acceptability (Kümpel and Rieger, 2019; Sood et al, 2012) and increase the harm for targets (Citron and Norton, 2011), counter speech as a “common, crowd-sourced response” (Bartlett and Krasodomski-Jones, 2015: 5) is essential It could help targets cope with the incidents (Leets, 2002), prevent them from perceiving that the majority of society agrees with the hate speech (Zerback and Fawzi, 2017), and convince uninvolved users not to endorse the hateful utterances (Schieb and Preuss, 2016). Unlike the previous research, which has mainly focused on members of the majority population, our study shifts the perspective by investigating the consequences of online hate speech on those affected by the derogatory content: Muslim social media users
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