Effectively reducing hate speech on social media is a defining challenge of the digital age. Hate speech expressions inflict non-trivial harm to individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, gender, religion and other characteristics. Hate speech’s lasting effects silence and marginalize vulnerable communities. When people see hate speech on social media they sometimes counter it publicly by condemning the transgression itself and/or by showing solidarity with the victim. In an in-the-wild study on X (formerly Twitter), we controlled user accounts to deliberately counter racist slurs and investigated whether transgressors would change their transgression behavior following our intervention. I will present the results of this research in the first part of the talk. Moving from the descriptive to the normative, I then argue that “ideal” counterspeech should follow three directives. One, counterspeech should be tailored to transgressor groups, two, counterspeech should be empathy-based, and, three, it should be performed by the social media operator.