Counterbalancing Hate with Positivity: A Survey of Counterspeech

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5599 Authors

Abstract: While the internet and social web platforms provide an effective stage to share ideas, exchange opinions, and debate issues at an unprecedented scale, ensuring civil discourse remains a major concern. Counterspeech is a broad umbrella term used for content that constitutes a response that takes issues with hateful, harmful, or extremist content. Counterspeech presents an appealing path to counter hateful or extreme content without requiring the removal of such content thus better serving free speech. This survey presents a broad take on counterspeech, outlining operationalization subtleties, pointing to existing resources to train supervised solutions, listing cutting-edge generative AI efforts, and finally, discussing extant gaps and challenges informing future research.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Research Area Keywords: Counterspeech, Hate Speech Mitigation, AI for Social Good

Contribution Types: Surveys

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5599