2020/12/31 by Corrado Fumagalli · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Law, Rights, and Freedoms #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1177/0090591720984724
openalex publication_date 2020/12/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Central to the still-nascent normative literature on counterspeech is the widespread belief that citizens should engage discursively with haters and the effects of hate speech. It is also increasingly clear that discursive engagement with intolerant members of society should be understood as a continuous and extended series of different and connected actions. Much less has been said about the ways that attempts in persuasion and direct responses to hate speech relate to one another and about when specific counterspeech actions should happen. This essay advances a more expansive and refined account of counterspeech, which is understood as a combination of continuous discursive engagement with intolerant members of society and acts of distancing from haters (shaming, correcting falsehoods, “Not in my name” campaigns, protests, and forms of discursive exit). After reconsidering discursive agency distribution (that is, who is an active participant, how, and when) around public hate speech, I show that continuous discursive engagement with intolerant members of society should be interrupted by visible acts of distancing when haters make hateful representative claims.