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Most adolescents and young adults frequently encounter hate speech online. Although online bystander intervention is essential to combating such hate, young bystanders may need support with initiating interventions online. Thus, to illuminate the factors of young bystanders' intervention, we conducted a nationwide, quota-based, quantitative online survey of 1180 young adults in Germany. Among the results, perceived personal responsibility for combating online hate speech positively predicted online bystanders' direct and indirect intervention. Moreover, frequent exposure to online hate speech was positively associated with bystander intervention, whereas, a perceived threat or low self-efficacy reduced the likelihood of intervention. Also, a greater acceptance of negative consequences and being educated about online hate speech through peers or campaigns all positively predicted some direct and indirect forms of online bystander intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User intervention against incivility is a significant element of democratic norm enforcement on social media, and feeling personally responsible for acting is a vital prerequisite for intervention. However, our insight into how users construe their sense of personal responsibility and expectations of other users remains limited. By theoretically foregrounding user perspective, this study investigates the boundaries and nuances of user responsibility to intervene against incivility. Empirically, it draws on 20 qualitative vignette interviews with young people in Germany. The findings show that as contexts collapse in users' newsfeeds, the imagined boundaries of personal public spheres and own social relationships with uncivil users serve as heuristics for hierarchizing and delimiting personal responsibility to intervene. Beyond abstract individual responsibility for the public discourse, practical responsibility is distributed among personal public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online hate speech is very common. This is problematic as degrading social groups can traumatize targets, evoke stress, and depression. Since no reaction of others could suggest the acceptability of hate speech, bystander intervention is essential. However, it is unclear when and how minorities react to hate speech. Drawing from social identity theory and research on in-group intervention, we inquire how Islamophobic online hate speech and counter speech by majority or minority members shape Muslims' willingness to intervene. Thus, in an online experiment (N = 362), we varied the presence of Islamophobic online hate speech and counter speech by a (non-) Muslim. Results showed that Islamophobic online hate speech led to a perceived religious identity threat which, in turn, increased the personal responsibility to intervene and resulted in higher intentions to utter factual counter speech. In addition, counter speech by both majority and minority members directly reduced Muslims' intentions to counterargue hatefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberbullying often happens in the presence of bystanders whose behaviors play a key role in changing dynamics of the situation. To examine the factors influencing cyberbystander likelihood of intervening in cyberbullying on social media, a 2 (degree of cyberbullying severity: high vs low) × 2 (level of interpersonal similarity: high vs low) between-subjects experiment was conducted (N = 132). Results indicated that cyberbystanders' empathic responses depended on the severity of cyberbullying. The more empathy bystanders felt, the more likely they were to publicly and privately intervene. Moreover, the indirect effect of cyberbullying severity on willingness to intervene through empathy was more pronounced when the interpersonal similarity between victim and cyberbystander was low, rather than it was high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study offers a linguistic–pragmatic examination of instances of bystander intervention, a social action that takes place when a bystander or a group of bystanders intervenes when a wrongdoer abuses a victim or behaves outside socially acceptable norms. We approach this social phenomenon by analyzing data drawn from a database of 11 video-recordings that all involve naturally occurring interactions in public settings in China. The notion of intervention discourse is tentatively introduced in this study to distinguish it from those used to achieve other communicative purposes and to disclose some recurrent patterns of language use in bystander intervention. The data analysis summarizes six categories of intervention discourse along the continuum of strong to weak intervention: terminating, consequence-stating, advising, judging, appealing and stance-taking. Our study demonstrates that the skillful exercise of deontic authority embodied in intervention discourse might have a tangible influence on the outcome of the intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how police officers understand and perceive the impact of bystander video on their work. Drawing from primarily qualitative data collected within two police departments in the Pacific Northwest, I describe how officers' concerns about objectivity, documentation, and transparency all manifest as parts of a broader politics of information within policing that has been amplified in recent years by the affordances of new media platforms and increasingly affordable surveillance-enabling technologies. Officers' primary concerns stem from their perceived inability to control the context of what is recorded, edited, and disseminated to broad audiences online through popular platforms such as YouTube.com, as well as the unwanted visibility (and accountability) that such online dissemination generates. I argue that understanding the effects of this 'new visibility' on policing, and the role played by new media in this process, has become vitally important to our tasks of organizing, understanding, and overseeing the police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the flagging behavior as specific type of bystander intervention against uncivil user comments in comments sections on news sites. Two experimental studies examine the effects of intervention information, characteristics of response comments, and the type of victim attacked in a comment on flagging behavior, that is on reporting a comment to professional moderators. Our results indicate that intervention information is a promising strategy to motivate flagging. Flagging is based on responsibility attribution to professional moderators but not on self-responsibility perception. Type of victim and characteristics of other users' posted responses to preceding comments (public disagreement and politeness) shape deviance perceptions of the situation and influence flagging behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberbullying can be harmful to adolescents using online technology, and one way of combating it may be to use interventions that have been successfully utilised for traditional bullying, such as encouraging peer bystander intervention. The online environment, however, differs notably from the environment in which traditional bullying takes place raising questions about the suitability of transferring traditional bullying approaches to the cyber environment. This study explored the perceptions of, and key influences on, adolescent bystanders who witness cyberbullying. In all, 24 interviews were conducted with students aged 13–16 years. Relationships emerged as a key theme with participants believing that a bystander’s relationship with both the perpetrator and the target influenced whether they would intervene when witnessing cyberbullying. Relationships also influenced their ability to understand the context of the situation, the perceived severity of the effect of the incident on the target and therefore the need, or otherwise, to seek help from adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the bystander effect in cyberbullying. On the basis of two experiments, we test whether individuals who witness cyberbullying are less willing to intervene when the number of others who have already observed the incident is increased. In addition, we inquire how differently severe cyberbullying incidents affect bystanders’ intention to intervene. Our results show that a very severe cyberbullying incident boosts individuals’ intention to intervene, mediated by the assessment of the situation as emergency and, in turn, by an increased feeling of responsibility. However, if there is a larger number of bystanders in a cyberbullying incident, rather than just a few, participants feel less responsible to help, and thus, they are less willing to intervene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how conceptions of `public opinion' are embedded within news-coverage of social protests at two levels: the micro-level in terms of informal characterizations of public opinion and the macro-level in terms of general conceptions of public opinion. At the micro-level, public opinion is brought into news stories in a variety of ways, including: statements about public opinion, depictions of compliance with or violation of social norms and laws, and portrayals of bystanders as symbols for public reaction. At the macro-level, coverage may have an underlying conception of public opinion as (1) aggregated individual opinion, (2) attempts of various groups to affect public policy and (3) a mechanism of social control. This case study of mainstream and alternative media coverage of three anarchist protests reveals differences at both the micro-descriptive and macro-conceptual levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DOI: 10.1177/1461444820902541 In this article, Figure 1 is not the correct version. Wang S (2020) Standing Up or Standing By: Bystander Intervention in Cyberbullying on Social Media. [Extracted from the article]