Online hate speech has become increasingly prevalent on social media, causing harm to individuals and society. While automated content moderation has received considerable attention, user-driven counterspeech remains a less explored yet promising approach. However, many people face difficulties in crafting effective responses. We introduce CounterQuill, a human-AI collaborative system that helps everyday users with writing empathetic counterspeech-not by generating automatic replies, but by educating them through reflection and response. CounterQuill follows a three-stage workflow grounded in computational thinking: (1) a learning session to build understanding of hate speech and counterspeech, (2) a brainstorming session to identify harmful patterns and ideate counterspeech ideas, and (3) a co-writing session that helps users refine their counter responses while preserving personal voice. Through a user study ($\mathbf{N} \boldsymbol{=} \mathbf{2 0}$), we found that CounterQuill helped participants develop the skills to brainstorm and draft counterspeech with confidence and control throughout the process. Our findings highlight how AI systems can scaffold complex communication tasks through structured, human-centered workflows that educate users on how to recognize, reflect on, and respond to online hate speech.

We introduce a multi-step reasoning framework using prompt-based LLMs to examine the relationship between social media language patterns and trends in national health outcomes. Grounded in fuzzy-trace theory, which emphasizes the importance of “gists” of causal coherence in effective health communication, we introduce Role-Based Incremental Coaching (RBIC), a prompt-based LLM framework, to identify gists at-scale. Using RBIC, we systematically extract gists from subreddit discussions opposing COVID-19 health measures (Study 1). We then track how these gists evolve across key events (Study 2) and assess their influence on online engagement (Study 3). Finally, we investigate how the volume of gists is associated with national health trends like vaccine uptake and hospitalizations (Study 4). Our work is the first to empirically link social media linguistic patterns to real-world public health trends, highlighting the potential of prompt-based LLMs in identifying critical online discussion patterns that can form the basis of public health communication strategies.

In this work, we examine the linguistic signature of online racial microaggressions (acts) and how it differs from that of personal narratives recalling experiences of such aggressions (recalls) by Black social media users. We manually curate and annotate a corpus of acts and recalls fromin-the-wild social media discussions, and verify labels with Black workshop participants. We leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and qualitative analysis on this data to classify (RQ1), interpret (RQ2), and characterize (RQ3) the language underlying acts and recalls of racial microaggressions in the context of racism in the U.S. Our findings show that neural language models (LMs) can classify acts and recalls with high accuracy (RQ1) with contextual words revealing themes that associate Blacks with objects that reify negative stereotypes (RQ2). Furthermore, overlapping linguistic signatures between acts and recalls serve functionally different purposes (RQ3), providing broader implications to the current challenges in content moderation systems on social media.

Laiba Mehnaz, Debanjan Mahata, Rakesh Gosangi, Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Riya Jain, Gauri Gupta, Amardeep Kumar, Isabelle G. Lee, Anish Acharya, Rajiv Ratn Shah. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.