Assessing the intent of the speaker is important for determining the action that needs to be taken against the speaker or to compensate for the expression.

Intent can be extremely hard to determine, but the speaker’s past actions, the way they have selected the audience of the message and the way they reacted after the speech are elements that can be rather easily determined.

 Criteria to be considered 

Past actions of the speaker with regards to the group targeted by the expression

Looking into the past actions of the speaker towards the group targeted by the expression can reveal whether the speaker holds negative feelings towards the group. If the speaker has fought for the rights of members of that group, then it is unlikely that there were bad intentions behind the negative expression.

The answer options, in order of severity: “Positive actions”, “Mixed actions / no actions”, “Negative actions”. When choosing the answer option, we recommend, when possible, to consider more recent actions of the speaker. 

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Reaction of the speaker after promoting the hate message

The way speakers react after distributing hateful narratives can provide clues as to the speaker’s actual intentions (e.g. showing true remorse or continuing incitement). The answer options, in order of severity are: “Apologies offered”, “No reaction”, “Continued incitement”.

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Intended audience of the hate message

Different audiences tend to react differently to the specific messages they are being presented. The answer options, in order of severity, are: “audience not likely to have negative feelings towards the targets of the expression”, “audience likely to have negative feelings towards the targets of the expression”, “audience having strong negative feelings towards the targets of the expression”.

2021-03-21T12:33:00