How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection Across Reddit Communities

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.

Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference). 28 pages, 12 figures, 24 tables. Content warning: this paper contains examples of racial stereotypes that may be upsetting or offensive. Code: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.04803 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.04803v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04803 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)