Hate crime rates grow steadily, although official statistics fail to express the real extent of such crimes. A cause of this gap is the fact that citizens often fail to report witnessed hate crimes. By failing to report, they blur the real magnitude of these crimes, legitimize and perpetuate their occurrence. According to the EU, civil society should be accountable in this process and cooperate with victims, namely by reporting hate crime. Hate speech is the most common hate crime and the one that most enacts a bystander effect. Hate speech is even more problematic in online contexts, in which people feel protected from face-to-face interaction. Moreover, in online contexts, social control mechanisms are perceived to be ineffective in controlling online misbehaviour. This project relies on a social responsibility enhancing approach to combat online hate speech. We will study psychosocial processes underlying bystander apathy facing online hate speech and test the effectiveness of prosocial determinants on stimulating individuals’ moral self-regulation aimed at decreasing their own bystander apathy and at the increasing report of online hate speech. Results might be promising to inform social media platforms about additional strategies to combat this misbehaviour and to provide information for anti-discrimination NGOs’ activists, politicians and moral entrepreneurs acting in anti-discrimination domains to decide the best strategies towards empowering "citizens against hate"
