Volunteers with the growing ‘counterspeech’ movement are trying to respond to online hate by posting messages that use facts, logic and compassion
A growing network of citizen volunteers in Canada and abroad has joined the “counterspeech” movement, which aims to push back against the spread of hate and disinformation online through positive messages, not confrontation.
“But in the spring of 2016 I saw a change in my flow,” she wrote. “It was no longer ‘the usual suspects’ that I almost expected this hatred from; instead it was entirely new groups. People that had read all this disinformation had become frightened by it. So I started looking up the pages they shared their racist and completely false claims and memes from and found a web of hundreds of hate groups and hateful fake news sites.
“As a couple in this still very white Germany, we are exposed in a way. I think our feeling that we have to change something got stronger,” she said.Helgeson said her involvement began after someone she knew began spewing anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of news reports about migrants crossing the border illegally from the United States into Canada. When she went online to see what could be feeding this sort of sentiment, she was taken aback.
But jumping in to the online fray was not easy. Helgeson is of Asian descent and was raised in rural Alberta by one of the few Asian families in town. Her parents taught her that if she experienced racism, she should ignore it or laugh about it, but “never rock that boat.” University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon, who hadn’t previously heard of the counterspeech movement, said it seems like a positive development.
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