• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Counterspeech: A tool for students who want to counter online hate

September 29, 2017 By Anne 2 Comments

Now, in time for National Bullying Prevention Month 2017, students have solid, research-based guidance for countering online hate, harassment and bullying – in the form of a cartoon!

Counterspeech tips thumbnail
Just a glimpse – click here for the full-size cartoon.

“Counterspeech DOs & DON’Ts” is the result of a months-long collaboration of iCanHelpline.org, iHeartMob.org, #ICANHELP, Project HEAR, The Dangerous Speech Project and some outstanding student advisers in California and Connecticut (it was Chet Ellis, student and award-winning essay writer in Conn., who advised that a cartoon would be much more accessible to his high school peers).

The resource is based on “Considerations for Successful Counterspeech,” by Susan Benesch, Derek Ruths, Kelly P Dillon, Haji Mohammad Saleem and Lucas Wright – cutting edge research in an emerging field. Included are some points from Megan Phelps-Roper’s TED Talk, which tells the story of how counterspeech can change people and lives and, as of this writing, has been viewed more than 4.5 million times.

I first blogged about Dr. Benesch’s work here after hearing her speak at at both Facebook’s 2015 Compassion Research Day and in a smaller multi-cultural meeting at Twitter. Two things compelled me to ask her about collaborating on (then) a counterspeech curriculum for students: 1) seeing research out of the University of New Hampshire showing that most bystanders try to help peers who are being targeted but hearing from educators that they generally don’t know how and 2) knowing that the bullying prevention field had been focusing more and more on turning bystanders into upstanders (some examples in this Google search). I wanted students to have a really accessible “tool” they could use to be the change-makers they want to be. My partners at #ICANHELP had seen and demonstrated over and over again that students are part of the solution to more than the problem of social cruelty online. So I reached out to our collaborators –HeartMob and their very talented designer Kendall Simpson kindly donated their time for breathing life and color into bullet points – as well as friends at the Born This Way Foundation and Teaching Tolerance to get this tool into the hands of as many students as possible.

We hope you’ll join us in using and sharing this tool widely. Happy Bullying Prevention Month!

Share Button

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, hate speech, Literacy & Citizenship, Research, Risk & Safety Tagged With: bullying, counter speech, counterspeech, cyberbullying, dangerous speech, Heartmob, icanhelp, iHeartmob, iHollaback, Project HEAR, Susan Benesch

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Diigo Links (Weekly) | Another EducatorAl Blog says:
    February 17, 2018 at 11:50 pm

    […] Counterspeech: A tool for students who want to counter online hate – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFa… […]

    Reply
  2. Diigo Links (weekly) | Mr. Gonzalez's Classroom says:
    October 1, 2017 at 10:16 am

    […] Counterspeech: A tool for students who want to counter online hate – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFa… […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.