**Abstract:** Hate speech is prevalent in online discussions and has harmful consequences, causing negative stereotyped attitudes - especially among citizens with negative prior attitudes towards the attacked group. However, there is still a lack of variety in the social groups under study, and a lack of research into possible solutions to the problem. Therefore, the aim of the current study is (1) to replicate previous findings for hate speech against Chinese and transgender people, and (2) to investigate if counter speech can overcome the effects of hate speech for implicit and explicit stereotypes, as well as social distancing. We test this in a pre-registered online experiment with a 2x3 between-subject design, varying the attacked group (Chinese/transgender people) and the type of comments (Hate Speech/neutral/Hate Speech and Counter Speech) with a sample representative of the Austrian population (n=1285). We find no effect of the manipulations on the dependent variables, indicating that citizens might not be as vulnerable to hate speech after all. However, an exploratory analysis shows that the effect of hate speech is moderated by political orientation: hate speech negatively affects implicit stereotypes (Chinese people) and social distancing (both groups) among right-wing citizens. In sum, we find that hate speech has mixed polarizing effects that counter speech is not able to diminish. **Contents:** - Stimulus Material - Questionnaire - Clean Data (respondents excluded as reported in the paper, all necessary variables) - R Scripts (data cleaning, data manipulation, data analysis, function to make plots reported in the paper)