Counter-speech: Examining content that challenges extremism online

"Facebook serves almost 1.5 billion people globally. Although the majority of people use the site for positive purposes, there are some who use the platform in negative ways. With that in mind, Facebook has created a set of policies, its Community Standards, detailing what type of content people can and cannot post. For instance, Facebook prohibits and removes hate speech, which it defines as ‘content that directly attacks people based on their: race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases’. Although it does not allow hate speech, sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook’s policies.To counter that type of disagreeable or extremist content, Facebook has publicly stated that it considers counter-speech – and the tools that their platform provides to help promote it – to play a critical role. Facebook thinks this is not only a potentially more effective way to tackle this problem, but crucially, is also more likely to succeed in the long run.Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content. Extreme posts are often met with disagreement, derision, and counter-campaigns. Combating extremism in this way has some advantages: it is faster, more flexible and responsive, capable of dealing with extremism from anywhere and in any language and retains the principle of free and open public spaces for debate. However, the forms counter-speech takes are as varied as the extremism they argue against. It is also likely that it is not always as effective as it could be; and some types of counter-speech could potentially even be counter-productive.Because of its strong belief in the power of counter-speech and the growing interest in a more rigorous and evidence-led approach to understand it better, Facebook asked Demos to undertake a series of research reports, examining the extent to which different types of counter-speech are produced and shared on Facebook.This short interim report sets out the summary findings of phase I, which looked at how speech which challenges right-wing populist pages across Europe, is produced and shared. Further reports in this series examine speech and content that challenges extreme Islamist ideology, in the UK and beyond.