Summary
Psychologist Mirta Galesic recommends brief public disagreement, support from others and continued dialogue as ways to respond to hateful online speech. The interview describes social-media analyses behind the advice.
Psychologist Mirta Galesic recommends a simple response to hateful online speech: state disagreement without feeling obliged to mount a lengthy argument. In a Nature interview, she says the aim is not necessarily to change the original poster’s mind, but to let other people see that the hateful view is contested.
Galesic also suggests asking friends to join in expressing dissent. When speaking with someone whose views differ, she advises keeping the conversation open and looking for common ground. The point is to distinguish opposing hateful speech from treating every disagreement as a reason to end contact.
Why a visible response may matter
Galesic’s reasoning centres on the people watching a conversation as well as the person who posted the hateful comment. A brief, clear objection can make disagreement visible without turning the exchange into an extended argument. Support from others may reinforce that signal.
She also argues that online environments can amplify fear and unease, and that people tend to align with the views around them. On that account, leaving hateful remarks uncontested can shape the impression of what others accept. A concise objection offers a way to make a different position visible, even if the original commenter remains unmoved.
The research behind the recommendations
Galesic and colleagues analysed more than one million posts made between January 2015 and December 2018 on Twitter, now known as X. The posts were responses to roughly 130,000 posts by German news organizations, journalists, bloggers and politicians. In later studies, her group used large language models to measure hate in conversations and categorized ways users responded to one another. Galesic says this work helped identify strategies for countering hate.
The evidence described in the interview comes from analysing online conversations, rather than a reported intervention trial. The interview gives no comparative effect sizes for the suggested responses, so the advice is best understood as Galesic’s research-informed guidance, not a quantified estimate of how much each tactic reduces hateful speech.