  Researchers have suggested that "the Manosphere," a conglomerate of
men-centered online communities, may serve as a gateway to far right movements.
In that context, this paper quantitatively studies the migratory patterns
between a variety of groups within the Manosphere and the Alt-right, a loosely
connected far right movement that has been particularly active in mainstream
social networks. Our analysis leverages over 300 million comments spread
through Reddit (in 115 subreddits) and YouTube (in 526 channels) to investigate
whether the audiences of channels and subreddits associated with these
communities have converged between 2006 and 2018. In addition to subreddits
related to the communities of interest, we also collect data on counterparts:
other groups of users which we use for comparison (e.g., for YouTube we use a
set of media channels). Besides measuring the similarity in the commenting user
bases of these communities, we perform a migration study, calculating to which
extent users in the Manosphere gradually engage with Alt-right content. Our
results suggest that there is a large overlap between the user bases of the
Alt-right and of the Manosphere and that members of the Manosphere have a
bigger chance to engage with far right content than carefully chosen
counterparts. However, our analysis also shows that migration and user base
overlap varies substantially across different platforms and within the
Manosphere. Members of some communities (e.g., Men's Rights Activists)
gradually engage with the Alt-right significantly more than counterparts on
both Reddit and YouTube, whereas for other communities, this engagement happens
mostly on Reddit (e.g., Pick Up Artists). Overall, our work paints a nuanced
picture of the pipeline between the Manosphere and the Alt-right, which may
inform platforms' policies and moderation decisions regarding these
communities.
