Style-Shifting Behaviour of the Manosphere on R eddit (2024)

Abstract: Hate speech groups (HSGs) may negatively influence online platforms through their distinctive language, which may affect the tone and topics of other spaces if spread beyond the HSGs. We explore the linguistic style of the Manosphere, a misogynistic HSG, on Reddit. We find that Manospheric authors have a distinct linguistic style using not only uncivil language, but a greater focus on gendered topics, which are retained when posting in other communities. Thus, potentially harmful aspects of Manospheric style carry over into posts on non-Manospheric subreddits, motivating future work to explore how this stylistic spillover may negatively influence community health.

## introduction a concern for broad social media platforms is the harmful influence of hate speech groups (hsgs). this impact may be wide-reaching because hsg members may post in non-hsg communities, negatively affecting their health @xcite . a potential adverse influence is the distinctive language used by hsgs, which has been characterized in terms of its toxicity or radicalization traits @xcite . however, other aspects of language may also be distinctive of hsgs, and may negatively affect the tone and topic of discussion in other spaces if spread beyond those groups. thus, assessing the influence of hsgs requires a more comprehensive understanding both of their linguistic style, and of whether and how that style is used by their members outside of the hsg communities. questions concerning how language reflects group membership and how speakers style shift -adapting their language across social contextsare core to the field of sociolinguistics @xcite @xcite . work in computational sociolinguis-tics has studied these questions online, exploring variation in style across communities (e.g., @xcite @xcite , as well as variation in how individuals adjust their style in different contexts (e.g., @xcite @xcite . however, little work has considered variation at both levels simultaneouslythat is, how speakers may carry over their use of a particular community's style outside that community. (to our knowledge, only @xcite to style-shifting between a single pair of communities.) here, we explore style-shifting among members of the manosphere, a misogynistic hate speech group (hsg) active on the online platform reddit @xcite . extending prior work @xcite , we investigate whether authors retain aspects of a manospheric style when posting in a range of 14 other non-manospheric communities (subreddits). our approach incorporates a broad set of linguistic features to identify nuanced ways that the style of hsgs may bleed into non-hateful spaces. in our work, we develop two kinds of linguistic style classifiers. 1 in rq1, our goal is to assess whether the manosphere has a distinct linguistic style, and to identify the important features of this style. to do this, we train one platform-level binary logistic regression model to predict whether a post was written inside or outside the manosphere. in rq2, we investigate how much manospheric individuals shift their style to that of some non-manospheric subreddit s. thus, for each subreddit s we consider, we train a binary logistic regression model to predict whether a post was written in the manosphere or in s, yielding a level of "manosphericness" of each post (compared to the style of s). we can assess style-shifting for each author by comparing the average manosphericness of their posts in the manosphere and in s. ## manospheric style-shifting (rq2) we now explore whether manospheric authors shift their style when posting on a non-manospheric subreddit s. to do so, we assess the level of manosphericness of each author's set of posts on the manosphere, and on s. for each s, we train a binary logistic regression model to predict whether a post was written on the manosphere or on s, using our final set of 34 features on the subredditspecific data described in section 2.2. we quantify the manosphericness of an author's set of posts (on the manosphere or on s) as the average of the model's class probability estimate over the set of posts (1 is fully manospheric). we assess style-shifting by comparing the manosphericness of manospheric authors on s to: (1) their manosphericness in the manosphere, and (2) the manosphericness of baseline authors on s. the first comparison reveals whether manospheric authors shift their style relative to how they post in the manosphere. the second shows whether they completely shift to speaking like other authors on s, or if they retain some degree of the manospheric style. we conduct paired t-tests for each comparison and report effect size using cohen's d. we find consistent and statistically significant results on all 14 subreddits, confirming the pattern exemplified in differences between the green and red (leftmost) distributions reveal that manospheric authors do not completely shift to speaking like other members of non-manospheric spaces: they use a more that bitch needs to be hit in the head with a bag of nickels. [...] m on r/videos ## conclusion we find that members of the manosphere, a prominent online hate speech group, have a distinct linguistic style. moreover, when posting outside the manosphere, manospheric authors retain elements of this style, including greater use of femalegendered terms and use of more uncivil language. these findings suggest concrete ways a hate speech group may shape discussions in other spaces. future work can build on our sociolinguisticallyinspired analyses to further explore the impact of hate speech groups. for example, causal analyses could reveal whether the act of participating in the manosphere changes the style that authors use in non-manospheric spaces, as well as how this stylistic spillover may harm community health.