**6. Practical Implications**

The findings of the present study signify a need for school staff, policy makers, and providers of social media to be aware of adolescents' exposure to online hate. Schools and their educational mission face a double challenge regarding online hate. On one hand, online hate is not just an online phenomenon, it can also affect peaceful coexistence at school. On the other hand, as a democracy-fostering authority, schools are predestined to counter online hate by teaching appropriate skills (i.e., media literacy, conflict strategies, democratic, and social skills). These skills can be enhanced through prevention programs that help adolescents understand that democratic values and basic human rights also apply to the online world. These programs should also aim to foster empathy with victims, take the perspective of the victim, embrace diversity, and enable adolescents to recognize and cope with online hate. The present study showed that toxic online disinhibition might prevent adolescents from becoming online hate perpetrator. Therefore, it seems important to increase the awareness among adolescents concerning how the online environment influences their own behavior. Increasing self-control, learning techniques for critical self-monitoring, and fostering of the ability to recognize social cues and self-reflection might reduce the effects of online disinhibition. Furthermore, policy makers have to ensure that they recognize the balance between enabling freedom of expression, protection from online hate, and punishing perpetrators. It is important that policy is developed to persuade people to not post hateful content in the first place or convince people to remove the content themselves and apologize. Policy makers should also urge social media platforms to rank such content lower in social media news feeds and/or to implement more efficient procedures for reporting the content. Social media platforms need to intensify their efforts to protect adolescents from online hate exposure by implementing practical systems to reduce exposure to online hate and for removal of online hate material. Social media platforms should also be expected to remove online hate content in a more efficient manner, as sometimes there is a lengthy amount of time between reporting and removal of the content.
