  Most Americans agree that misinformation, hate speech and harassment are
harmful and inadequately curbed on social media through current moderation
practices. In this paper, we aim to understand the discursive strategies
employed by people in response to harmful speech in news comments. We conducted
a content analysis of more than 6500 comment replies to trending news videos on
YouTube and Twitter and identified seven distinct discursive objection
strategies (Study 1). We examined the frequency of each strategy's occurrence
from the 6500 comment replies, as well as from a second sample of 2004 replies
(Study 2). Together, these studies show that people deploy a diversity of
discursive strategies when objecting to speech, and reputational attacks are
the most common. The resulting classification scheme accounts for different
theoretical approaches for expressing objections and offers a comprehensive
perspective on grassroots efforts aimed at stopping offensive or problematic
speech on campus.
