Language of the Swedish Manosphere with Swedish FrameNet (2025)

Abstract: The manosphere is a loose group of online communities centralised around the themes of anti-feminism, misogyny, and hetero-masculinity. It has gained a reputation for violent extremism, particularly from members of the incel community. Sweden sees one of the highest volumes of online traffic to well-known incel forums in all of Europe. In spite of this, there is little information on manosphere/incel culutre in Swedish. This paper uses posts from Flashback’s manosphere subforum automatically annotated with Swedish FrameNet to analyse the language community in a Swedish context. To do so, a lexicon for the Swedish manosphere was created and terms of interest were identified in the Swedish discourse. Analysis of prominent semantic frames linked to these terms of interest presents a detailed look into the language of the Swedish manosphere.

## introduction the 'manosphere' is a collection of online communities, including involuntary celibates (incels), men's rights activists (mras), pick-up artists (puas), and men going their own way (mg-tow) @xcite @xcite . such communities function as online spaces for men to discuss topics related to feminism, masculinity, and relationships through a lens of misogyny and racism @xcite . involuntary celibates or 'incels' are defined as men who experience frustration at their inability to find a romantic/sexual partner despite desiring one and express this frustration by blaming and denigrating others. despite several acts of mass violence performed by self-identified incels, the community itself maintains that the link between inceldom and violence is a result of media pigeonholing. 1 concern over the risk of violence perpetrated by members of the manosphere, particularly by incels, continues to deepen among the public and law enforcement @xcite . according to the swedish defence research institute (foi), sweden ranks among the top countries for traffic to the largest incel forums @xcite . it is estimated that sweden sees 240 visits per million residents compared to the u.s.a.'s 43 per million @xcite . in incel discourse, sweden is described as the most 'cucked' foot_1 country due to its perceived feminist influence @xcite . the seemingly sudden increase of traffic to incel communities from sweden has caused both scholars and security agencies to monitor the situation closely. although swedish incels are acknowledged as a substantial demographic in the manosphere, relatively little is known about them. furthermore, the swedish manosphere has been overlooked in nlp thus far. this paper aims to bridge the gap between the qualitative research on the swedish manosphere and nlp by investigating the language of the manosphere through semantic frames automatically annotated with swedish framenet (swefn). frame net is a set of labels developed by @xcite based on the theory of semantic frames by @xcite ( § 4.2). the findings of this paper are intended help expand the current swefn annotations with semantic frames for societal issues related to the manosphere in sweden. additionally, it contributes a non-anglocentric analysis to the body of research on discourse in the manosphere. in doing so, it yields the following contributions: psycho-social aspects of the manosphere, inceldom, misogyny, and sexual violence have been the subject of numerous studies. @xcite used semantics of the passive voice to study newspaper articles featuring sexual violence. results indicated that the passive voice was used to obscure agency in reports of sexual violence against women. @xcite proposed a framework for studying responsibility framing in reports of violence against women in italian news. it was observed that roles corresponding to victims were expressed much more frequently than those corresponding to agents. @xcite studied twelve mra websites from the perspective of hegemonic masculinity. two distinctive groups, both featuring antifeminist discourse, were revealed. one group promoted the ideology of men's rights through demonization of feminism and aggression towards women, while the other took a political approach and focused on providing evidence of anti-male institutional prejudice and discrimination. in a study featuring interviews from former incels, participants reported that feelings of isolation, low self-worth, and romantic frustration led them seeking support online @xcite . many of these men indicated that feelings of isolation and low self-worth dependent on appearance and success were caused by masculine norms. @xcite studied comments on reddit's r/braincels subforum and identified several themes of which the concept of social isolation was present. in sweden, many men also claim to suffer from loneliness, especially those living in rural communities @xcite . discourse analysis has been a popular method for studying language in the manosphere. @xcite used critical discourse analysis (cda) to highlight ideological tropes in a selection of content from frequently cross-referenced sites with a baseline of anti-feminism. focus on the concept of evolutionary biology gave rise to a deeply misogynist, heterosexist, and racist lexicon. the community itself was also found to have moved away from activism toward personal attacks on feminists. a study of 700 posts from five of the top incel forums found several topics related to the themes of @xcite . discussion of who an incel is and what inceldom entails were prevalent topics. along with this came discussions of appearance, self-worth, and race. while language was described as negative, encouragement of violence was uncommon. the link between inceldom and violent extremism has also featured heavily in the body of research. in a study of incel discourse on the plymouth shooting incident, 3 lounela and murphy (2024) examined several threads on english incel forums and observed competing discourses around incel violence. while some attempted to justify the plymouth attack, others condemned all violence. @xcite investigated the incel world-view on the now defunct incels.me forum and found that violent events elicited hope that they may lead to society's recognition of the alleged excesses of feminism. members engaged in fantasising graphic scenarios centred on the suffering of women and encouraged each other to do so as well. in another study of incel subforums on reddit, @xcite found that online discussion in the reddit incelosphere presented an increasing proportion of dehumanising labels and words depicting violence. in a linguistic analysis of the incels.me forum, @xcite identified common keywords. the top 100 keywords largely referenced gender and physical traits, while the top 1000 also contained references to sexuality, violence, and hate speech. yoder et al. ( 2023 ) used text analysis to investigate identity construction on the forum incels.is by comparing identity mentions with the white supremacist forum stormfront. for this, an english lexicon was created by combining multiple sources then expanded using nearest neighbours in the word embedding space. the most frequent identity mentions are for women and minor-ity/racialised identities, including many derogatory neologisms. while previous research on the manosphere has been viewed largely through an anglophone context, several studies have investigated the italian incel community @xcite @xcite . @xcite established a dataset labelled with semantic frames for the italian incel community. the highest-ranked and most informative frames were identified for each subcorpus. to detect hate speech in incel communities, @xcite used masked language modelling (mlm) with bert and mbert adapted to the english and italian incel domain. research on the manosphere in sweden has largely focused on english forums, even when studying swedish incels @xcite . in the swedish context, @xcite analysed threads from the swedish forum flashback containing the word 'incel' or 'incels' with techniques from cda. users discussed the topic of immigration in relation to a surplus of men in sweden and how this negatively impacts the white swedish man @xcite . swedish incels also commonly express that they feel less desirable than men of colour @xcite . swedish women are described as privileged and positioned as the opposition in a power struggle with men @xcite @xcite . through discourse analysis and personal communication with stefan krakowski, a media expert and scholar of swedish incels, wiklund (2020) analysed discourse surrounding incels on flashback. search terms, including 'incel' and 'misogyny', were used to identify threads for analysis. @xcite observed that feminism is used to legitimise dehumanisation of women and increased immigration is portrayed as societal problem. the flashback manosphere was also found to be incredibly sensitive to its portrayal in the media, directing personal attacks at female writers on the swedish manosphere. the following sections will outline the methods used to identify terms of interest in the swedish manosphere and their prominent frames, the means through which they were analysed, and the data used in the analysis. ## data the analysis in this paper focuses on the manosfärer, maskulinism, och mansrörelser "manospheres, masculinism, and men's movements" subforum on flashback. the hobby subforum was also collected for comparison, as it was the closest in size of the other lifestyle subforums. flashback data is collected and annotated in yearly updates which are stored in xml format. the version used in this analysis was collected in march 2024 and contains all threads created between october 2012 and march 2024 (språkbanken text, 2024a). threads have been scrambled to preserve user privacy and copyright. additionally, usernames have been removed. a total of 12,943 posts were from the manosphere subforum and another 16,565 from the hobby subforum were used in the analysis. each thread has been automatically annotated with semantic frames from swefn with the sparv pipeline @xcite . only the posts from the manosphere subforum are used in the discussions in §5. ## results and discussion the prominent frames identified for each term are used to connect related concepts to fes. analysing the posts containing these related frames, the words they are triggered by, and the words around them allows one to gain insight into what entities fill which roles. frames were ranked from lowest to highest based on their ff-icf score with the highest two (or more, if scores were equal) scores being most typical. in the following sections, numbers in brackets indicate the relative frequency of the entity which either triggered the frame or fills one of the frame's roles in the context of the specific term of interest. as an example, in §5.1, of the instances of receiving for the term 'bluepill', 50% had a theme of sympathy or hope. similarly, in §5.4, of the instances of the frame origin, 36% were the word 'swedish'. the terms of interest introduced by figure (1) 5 frame frequency -inverse corpus frequency can be categorised by five themes: inceldom and mental health, feminism and lgbtq+, race and origin, immigration and male surplus, power and violence. these themes have been chosen based on the close interaction between these words within each category, such as the claimed 'cause and effect' relationship between immigration and 'male surplus' discussed in §5.4. all examples have been translated to english from the original swedish. ## conclusion in this paper, the language of the swedish manosphere was investigated through the lens of semantic frames. as there was no list of terms specific to swedish, relative frequencies were used with log ratio to develop a lexicon for the swedish manosphere. words with high frequency and/or high log ratio were used to identify terms of interest, which were further narrowed down based on topics observed in previous research. these terms were separated into five general categories with interrelated and overlapping contexts. by analysing the terms of interest and their prominent frames, it was possible to determine which narratives are shared by the swedish and english manospheres and which are unique to sweden. additionally, it links swedish incel terms with frames and roles which enables the expansion of existing frame annotation with swefen. mapping words from the manosphere which currently lack framenet annotations to frames and roles can be used to build upon the current semantic frame schema for swedish frames for societal issues.