**Perceiving Hate Speech** This project aims to understand when and why people judge political messages of their opponents as "hate speech", "inciting to violence" or similar adverse attitudes. [Brief description][1] of studies 1 and 2 and results. See [our APS poster][2] here. Our basic experimental methodology is to present participants with ostensibly real Facebook posts - generated by an online generator - that target groups that may be considered closer to liberals or conservatives. Afterward, we compare how people's rejection of the post (e.g., "This should be considered hate speech", "Facebook should ban this user", "These words actually hurt people") depends on ideological affinity between the target and the judge. ---------- We hypothesized a motivated reasoning effect: people will be more likely to reject post messages that are counter-attitudinal that pro-attitudinal. Our initial results support the hypothesis, but also introduce new questions. Preliminary analyses show a main effect of ideology: it seems that liberals are more likely to qualify the posts as hate speech when liberal groups are being targeted (e.g., Black people, LGBT) in comparison to consevatives in the same condition (e.g., gun owners, blue collar workers) Contact: Cristian Rodriguez (c.rodriguez@uci.edu) [1]: https://osf.io/4sg3k/ [2]: https://osf.io/x7k6z/