Exploring Misogyny across the Manosphere in Reddit

The ‘manosphere’ has been a recent subject of feminist scholar- ship on the web. Serious accusations have been levied against it for its role in encouraging misogyny and violent threats towards women online, as well as for potentially radicalising lonely or dis-enfranchised men. Feminist scholars evidence this through a shift in the language and interests of some men’s rights activists on the manosphere, away from traditional subjects of family law or mental health and towards more sexually explicit, violent, racist and homophobic language. In this paper, we study this phenomenon by investigating the flow of extreme language across seven online communities on Reddit, with openly misogynistic members (e.g., Men Going Their Own Way, Involuntarily Celibates), and investigate if and how misogynistic ideas spread within and across these communities. Grounded on feminist critiques of language, we created nine lexicons capturing specific misogynistic rhetoric (Physical Violence, Sexual Violence, Hostility, Patriarchy, Stoicism, Racism, Homophobia, Belittling, and Flipped Narrative) and used these lexicons to explore how language evolves within and across misogynistic groups. This analysis was conducted on 6 million posts, from 300K conversations created between 2011 and December 2018. Our results shows increasing patterns on misogynistic content and users as well as violent attitudes, corroborating existing theories of feminist studies that the amount of misogyny, hostility and violence is steadily increasing in the manosphere

MAPPING THE MANOSPHERE: A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF THE MANOSPHERE ON REDDIT

The manosphere network is a dispersed collection of online spaces that proliferate an anti-feminist ideology that in some cases has been associated with violence. This thesis aims to observe the manosphere network structure as it exists on Reddit by using a mixed method research design of digital ethnography and social network analysis (SNA). This research identified a unifying anti-feminist framework and found that informal social divisions within the network faded over time, which indicates that both moderate and extreme manosphere subgroups are now sharing common online spaces. It also found that platform algorithms helped with network resilience by acting as gatekeepers of information that suggested related content and shielded unrelated content to users that helped to grow the network in size and interconnectivity.Civilian, Department of Homeland SecurityApproved for public release. distribution is unlimite

The Evolution of the {Manosphere} Across the {Web}

In this paper, we present a large-scale characterization of the Manosphere, a conglomerate of Web-based misogynist movements roughly focused on "men's issues," which has seen significant growth over the past years. We do so by gathering and analyzing 28.8M posts from 6 forums and 51 subreddits. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the Manosphere on the Web, showing the links between its different communities over the years. We find that milder and older communities, such as Pick Up Artists and Men's Rights Activists, are giving way to more extremist ones like Incels and Men Going Their Own Way, with a substantial migration of active users. Moreover, our analysis suggests that these newer communities are more toxic and misogynistic than the former

Virtual manhood acts within social networks: The enactment of toxic masculinity on Reddit

Toxic masculinity (TM) has emerged as a label for the western hegemonic masculine ideal, which is generally defined by the pressure for boys and men to be aggressive and dominant, restrict emotional expression, and marginalize women and others that do not adhere to these values (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Kupers, 2005). This phenomenon increases the risk for male identified individuals to engage in general acts of bigotry, especially gender-based violence (APA, 2018; Baugher & Gazmararian, 2015; FBI, 2007; Feder, Levant, & Dean, 2010). A contemporary touchpoint associated with proliferating TM ideologies is participation in online anonymous “toxic technoculture” social network communities (Massanari, 2017; Salter, 2018). A timely investigation was conducted by Moloney and Love (2018) that explored the enactments of masculinity in virtual online spaces. They subsequently introduced the concept of Virtual Manhood Acts (VMA) which provides a framework to understand how masculinity is observed online. VMA were characterized as behaviors enacted to maintain a heterosexist environment and to oppress women and others in virtual social spaces. Prior to this study there was limited empirical understanding of how problematic and toxic enactments of masculinity, evident in society, are also enacted in virtual spaces. This study addresses the call to investigate enactments of VMA on other online social platforms. This qualitative investigation of the enactment of VMA was conducted on Reddit, the most popular social network website and seventh most trafficked website in North America (Hardwick, 2020, May 9). Data was captured before and after two publicized mass femicide events from two Manosphere connected Reddit community forums (r/IncelsWithoutHate & r/MensRights). The identified forums have been implicated as featuring misogynistic and bigoted ideological posts. Data was analyzed utilizing the a priori concept of VMA and a modified constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014). This hybrid deductive and inductive approach allowed for identifiable, novel, and divergent themes of manhood enactments to emerge. The results and implications of this study are discussed with select psychological frameworks and other fields of study in mind

The Evolution of the Manosphere across the Web

We present a large-scale characterization of the Manosphere, a conglomerate of Web-based misogynist movements focused on men's issues, which has prospered online. Analyzing 28.8M posts from 6 forums and 51 subreddits, we paint a comprehensive picture of its evolution across the Web, showing the links between its different communities over the years. We find that milder and older communities, such as Pick Up Artists and Men's Rights Activists, are giving way to more extreme ones like Incels and Men Going Their Own Way, with a substantial migration of active users. Moreover, our analysis suggests that these newer communities are more toxic and misogynistic than the older ones

On the use of Jargon and Word Embeddings to Explore Subculture within the Reddit’s Manosphere

Understanding the identities, needs, realities and development of subcultures has been a long term target of sociology and cultural studies. Socio-cultural linguistics, in particular, examines the use of language and, in particular, the existence and use of neologisms, slang and jargon. These terms capture concepts and expressions that are not in common use and represent the new realities, norms and values of subcommunities. Identifying and understanding such terms, however, is a very complex task, particularly considering the vast amount of content that is currently available online for many such groups. In this paper, we propose a combination of computational and socio-linguistic methods to automatically extract new terminology from large amounts of data, using word-embeddings to semantically contextualise their meaning. As a use case, we explore subculture on the platform Reddit. More specifically, we investigate groups considered part of the manosphere, a loose online community where men’s perspectives, gripes, frustrations and desires are explicitly expressed and where women are typically targets of hostility. Characterisations of this group as a subculture are then provided, based on an in-depth analysis of the identified jargon

Misogyny and the construction of toxic masculinity in the Spanish Manosphere (Burbuja.info)

The anonymity of the Manosphere has provided a fertile breeding ground for the spread of misogyny through increased hate speech on the Internet. In recent years, this virtual space composed mostly of men, has been the subject of numerous studies aimed at identifying the discursive mechanisms of identity constructions that underlie the denigration of women. This paper takes the findings from international research on the subject to address a phenomenon still little explored in Spain through the analysis of misogynistic comments on Burbuja.info. Economic forum. The analysis sample comprises 4,281 messages that include the lexeme "woman" posted over 2.5 years, 761 of which contain expressions that ridicule, disparage, or insult women. Thematic analysis demonstrates the repetition of misogynistic topics and tropes common in the most radical Reddit and 4chan subforums, such as hypergamy, objectification, and the constant disparagement of the world of women, not to mention criticism of feminism, left-wing political parties, and legislation on gender violence. The results obtained show that the "male identity crisis" is narratively constructed in the messages on Burbuja.info using the motif of sacrifice -the cornerstone of a monotypic story in which the purpose of the hero-man-victim's journey is to punish the villain-woman. Furthermore, we also found that there are different configurations of identity related to attitudes toward women; these match up with the four most prominent masculinist subcultures identified in the leading literature on the subject: Men Rights activists (MRA), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), Pickup Artists (PUA), and Involuntary Celibates (Incels).El incremento de los discursos de odio en internet encuentra en la anonimia de la Manosfera el terreno abonado donde diseminar la misoginia. En los últimos años, este espacio virtual integrado en su mayor parte por hombres, está siendo objeto de numerosos estudios dirigidos a identificar los mecanismos discursivos de las construcciones identitarias que subyacen a la denostación de las mujeres. Este trabajo asume los resultados obtenidos en las investigaciones internacio-nales sobre el tema con la finalidad de afrontar un fenómeno todavía muy poco explorado en España, a través del análi-sis de los comentarios misóginos de Burbuja.info, foro de economía. La muestra de análisis comprende los 4.281 mensa-jes que incluyen el lexema "mujer" publicados a lo largo de dos años y medio, en 761 de los cuales figuran expresiones que ridiculizan, minusvaloran o injurian a las mujeres. El análisis temático evidencia la reiteración de los tópicos y de los tropos de la misoginia habituales en los subforos de Reddit y 4chan más radicales, como la hipergamia, la cosificación y la constante minusvaloración del universo femenino, a los que cabe añadir la crítica al feminismo, a los partidos políticos de izquierda y a la legislación sobre violencia de género. Los resultados obtenidos ponen de manifiesto que la "crisis de la identidad masculina" se construye narrativamente en los mensajes de Burbuja.info mediante el motivo del sacrificio, piedra angular de un relato monotípico en el que el viaje del héroe-hombre-víctima tiene como finalidad castigar al villa-no-mujer. Se constata asimismo la existencia de diferentes configuraciones identitarias derivadas de la actitud hacia las mujeres, asimilables a las cuatro subculturas masculinistas más relevantes identificadas en la bibliografía de referencia sobre el tema: Men Rights Activists (MRA); Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW); Pick up Artists (PUA) e Involuntary Celibates (Incels)

Members in good standing? The relationship between NoFap/reboot communities and the manosphere

NoFap/reboot communities are online groups of mostly men trying to abstain from pornography and/or masturbation. For researchers exploring the manosphere, a loose collation of digital communities in which men affirm and replicate antifeminist/promale hegemonic identities and attitudes, controversy exists as to the extent to which they align with other groups. Members and content creators share fundamental manosphere values, including the perception of a battle for masculinity, a natural male hierarchy, and the instrumentalization of women. However, individuals abstain for many reasons, indicating motivational variance. There are also competing narratives surrounding the supposedly harmful impact of pornography that vary in their compatibility with the manosphere. The potential for ideological crossover and a pipeline into more extreme content are discussed