How social responses to online hate messages affect hatefulness

This study explored competing predictions about how social interactions among social media hate posters affect the sequential level of hatefulness as toxicity. Analyses involve a thousand original hateful posts and the subsequent posts by the same posters ( N = 1,227,756 posts) on Gab—a platform particularly hospitable to hate messaging—and Likes, Dislikes, and written replies from other users that affirmed or negated the initial hate posts. Likes and affirming replies were commonplace, whereas Dislikes and negation replies were rare. Getting Likes and affirming replies decreased subsequent toxicity in the short term, as did getting no responses whatsoever. Getting Dislikes increased the hatefulness of users’ next original post and their posts over the next 3 months. Results challenge both the social approval theory of online hate and the need-threat approach to effects of responses to social media hate posting.