We explore authentic counterhate arguments for online hateful content toward individuals. Previous efforts are limited to counterhate to fight against hateful content toward groups. Thus, we present a corpus of 54,816 hateful tweet-paragraph pairs, where the paragraphs are candidate counterhate arguments. The counterhate arguments are retrieved from 2,500 online articles from multiple sources. We propose a methodology that assures the authenticity of the counter argument and its specificity to the individual of interest. We show that finding arguments in online articles is an efficient alternative to counterhate generation approaches that may hallucinate unsupported arguments. We also present linguistic insights on the language used in counterhate arguments. Experimental results show promising results. It is more challenging, however, to identify counterhate arguments for hateful content toward individuals not included in the training set.

Counterhate arguments can effectively fight and limit the spread of hate speech. However, they can also exacerbate the hate, as some people may respond with aggression if they feel threatened or targeted by the counterhate. In this paper, we investigate replies to counterhate arguments beyond whether the reply agrees or disagrees with the counterhate argument. We present a corpus with 2,621 replies to counterhate arguments countering hateful tweets, and annotate them with fine-grained characteristics. We show that (a) half of the replies (51%) to the counterhate arguments disagree with the argument, and (b) this kind of reply often supports the hateful tweet (40%). We also analyze the language of counterhate arguments that elicit certain types of replies. Experimental results show that it is feasible to anticipate the kind of replies a counterhate argument will elicit.