Imagining Community Through Counterspeech

As online spaces have become increasingly hostile, some internet users have begun to organize collectively to counter hatred through what is known as counterspeech. This article explores how loosely affiliated individuals come to feel a strong sense of community in such efforts, even when they have never met in person. Using digital ethnographic data collected on the international counterspeaking group #iamhere, I argue that participants build imagined rhetorical communities: affective bonds forged through shared moral language and collective communicative action. Although members are geographically dispersed and largely unknown to one another offline, they nonetheless experience a sense of solidarity rooted in their common linguistic and ethical framework. This article shows how rhetorical practices, particularly those focused on empathy and civil discourse, become the glue that holds these activist formations together. By examining the ways moral discourse enables both individual agency and collective identity in counterspeech, this work offers new insight into how human groups form online to resist hatred and assert shared values.