People use stories to challenge racial stereotypes on Reddit communities
How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection Across Reddit Communities
Computation and Language
Summary
Racial stereotypes are often shared online, but some people respond by telling counter-stories that challenge these stereotypes using personal experiences or examples. The authors created a new method to find and study these counter-stories in Reddit posts, focusing on how they relate to stereotypes. They collected and analyzed over 25,000 Reddit posts, identifying over 1,300 counter-stories and showing that who writes the stories and the conversations around them affect how the stories are told. This work helps computers recognize these complex stories and supports understanding how people fight stereotypes in online discussions.
What this means in practice
- •For content moderation teams: Identify and characterize counter-stories against racial stereotypes to improve moderation of sensitive online discussions.
- •For social media platform developers: Build tools that detect nuanced narrative responses to stereotypes to support healthier community interactions in social media.
Authors
Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Jimin Mun, Maarten Sap, Maria Antoniak
Abstract
Counter-storytelling is a powerful mechanism people use to challenge dominant narratives. Unlike other forms of counterspeech that have been widely studied in computational social science, counter-storytelling has largely been overlooked. Counter-stories are difficult to detect automatically; they are relational (defined with respect to expressions of racial stereotypes) and structurally diverse (drawing on stories that describe lived experiences, witnessed events, exemplars, and hypotheticals). We introduce a first framework for detecting and characterizing counter-storytelling against racial stereotypes at scale. This includes (1) a three-dimensional taxonomy grounded in narratology and Critical Race Theory and (2) a multi-stage pipeline that identifies relational pairs of stereotypes and counter-stories in noisy Reddit discourse. Using this pipeline, we annotate 25,549 Reddit posts across 615 communities and identify 1,312 counter-stories. Our analysis shows that speaker identity and post context shape how counter-stories are told. For example, in-group writers favor first-person testimony, often adopting the role of self-reflective insiders. Our work shows how computational methods can scale qualitative approaches to identify and characterize counter-storytelling as a contextual narrative practice, with implications for content moderation, narratology, and racial discourse analysis.