Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum (2023)

Abstract: Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels.is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.

## introduction warning: this paper contains content that is disturbing, offensive, and/or hateful. online communities of those calling themselves "involuntary celibates" (incels) are known for online misogynist hate speech and offline violence targeting women, including incidents of mass violence in isla vista, california, in 2014 and toronto, canada, in 2018, among others. though some work in natural language processing (nlp) has focused on features of misogynist language in general @xcite @xcite , online incel communities are known for significant lexical innovation @xcite . training with data from incel forums would enable misogynist hate speech classifiers to identify the neologisms and novel ideological features of this dangerous form of online misogyny @xcite . in this paper, we provide hate speech researchers with a quantitative overview of trends and particularities of language in one of the largest misogynist incel communities, incels.is, which launched in 2017 following the r/incels ban from reddit. we focus this analysis on mentions of identities, which are key to automatically identifying hate speech @xcite and a window into the ideologies of social movements @xcite . we ground this analysis in theoretical approaches that focus on how identities are constructed in interaction @xcite and investigate the following research questions: rq1. how frequently are different identities, including novel terms for identities, mentioned in incels.is discourse? rq2. how do identity mentions in incels.is discourse change over time? rq3. how are identity mentions used differently by central incels.is users? rq4. what textual associations are made with identity groups on incels.is? to address these research questions, we first measure the distribution of identity term mentions using a large generic list of identity terms combined with community-specific identity terms surfaced from a word embedding-based approach. we confirm the most frequent identity mentions in this data are for women, with almost one-fourth of these being derogatory community-specific neologisms, such as "femoids." mentions of gender are much higher than in a comparative white supremacist dataset, a similar commonly-used source of unlabeled hate speech @xcite . we find increasing mentions of other minoritized identities, such as black, lgbtq+ and jewish people on incels.is, suggesting a consolidation with broader far-right discourses. users who are central to the network proportionally mention more of these other marginalized identities. from a quantitative analysis of the immediate contexts in which identity term mentions appear, a pervasive hatred of women is clear, as well as reinforcement of stereotypes about other marginalized groups. the incel identity itself is often discussed with themes of victimhood and boundary-keeping for "true" versus "fake" incels. throughout our analysis, we find evidence of an essentialist, black-pilled ideological framework where physical appearance determines the value of individuals and groups. while rigid racial and gender hierarchies are not new (e.g., eugenics) and are often circulated in far-right discourse @xcite , this incel community attaches many novel measurements to appearance related to these hierarchies, re-entrenching and extending them. we argue that to detect such a particular form of extremism, hate speech researchers must heed both the jargon and deeper ideologies of this movement. ## incels and male supremacism online misogynist incel communities are situated within a set of anti-feminist groups often termed the "manosphere." these groups include men's rights activists, pick up artists (puas), men going their own way (mgtow). such groups are often associated with a "red pill" ideology, a matrix film reference to seeing the hidden truth behind the world, in this far-right context a view that feminism has brainwashed and subordinated men @xcite . in addition, incels often refer to a "black pill," the idea that they are genetically predetermined to be incels and cannot improve their situation through work or self-improvement @xcite . this leaves many black-pilled incels feeling that their only options are to cope, commit suicide, or commit mass violence (expressed in the common phrase, "cope, rope or go er [elliot rodger, an incel mass shooter])." among groups in the manosphere, incels are most associated with violent and high-profile events that demonstrate "extreme misogyny" @xcite . @xcite find that incel communities are both more extreme and more popular than older, more moderate male supremacist movements, while laviolette and hogan (2019) find more extreme manosphere movements contain essentialist, deterministic ideologies of identity, which we also find in incels.is. we find evidence of this reductionist and biologically essentialist worldview in associations with identities in incels.is. qualitative research on male supremacist extremism frequently examines men's rights ac-tivists (berger, 2018) and more moderate groups that are less niche and without the emergent vocabulary common in incel spaces. we find this tendency extends to the data sources in automated hate speech research and argue for the importance of attending to the particularly dangerous discourse of black-pilled incels such as those on incels.is. quantitative and computational studies of the manosphere often focus on the unique misogynist language use of these communities. gothard (2021) and @xcite surface incel jargon by comparing word frequencies in incel reddit posts with subreddits and wikipedia articles outside of the incel movement, while @xcite find frequent incel terms not present in english dictionaries and expand their lexicon with a word embedding space. such word frequency analysis, as well as hand-crafted lexicons, are often used to measure and study misogyny in the manosphere @xcite @xcite . @xcite and @xcite use topic modeling to characterize narratives and map out user trajectories on incels.is and r/theredpill, respectively. @xcite use word frequency analysis to study identity construction on a similar forum, incels.me, though their 6-month dataset only enables limited time-series analysis. in contrast, our work focuses on the use and contexts of generic and community-specific identity terms beyond a sole focus on misogyny, as well as how identity term use changes over time. ## data our dataset contains 6,248,234 english-language public comments posted between the forum's creation in november 2017 and scraping in april 2021. 1 it includes forum and thread names, as well as the date of posting, user names and the comment's full text. however, it does not contain images, which is a limitation. ## methods we take a quantitative approach to studying discursive identity construction @xcite , borrowing a focus on in-group and out-group identity presentation from social identity theory @xcite . specifically, we examine the use of identity terms and the immediate contexts in which they appear. a few mentions of an identity group may not represent attitudes of participants, but associations repeatedly made over the course of a 6 million-post corpus are more likely to capture widely shared beliefs @xcite . ## discussion across our quantitative analysis of the distribution and associations made with identity terms, we see evidence of an ideology where physical appearance determines human value, as has been found with prior work on incels @xcite @xcite . this ideology essentializes social constructs, such as race and gender, as biological physical features impacting desirability, with controversy over the role of race. we find strong evidence for gender as a cen-tral focus of incel discussion; mentions of men and women far surpass the number of mentions of any other identity. we find that this community commonly uses novel identity terms that may not appear in generic lists, including many derogatory terms for women ("foids," "landwhales"). increases in mentions of lgbtq+, political, jewish, and black identities, often with stereotypes and conspiracy theories, could suggest this community has incorporated broader far-right trends. an increasing politicization is reflected in this example post: "we don't need society to completely accept the incel ideology, we just need to masquerade as normies and keep bashing women, jews and gays." our evidence from text analysis supports the common user movement that @xcite found from manosphere content to alt-right content on youtube and reddit. we find that many associations on incels.is reinforce stereotypes such as lgbtq+ identities being fake, black people being criminals, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. users who are central in the forum's shared network devote more identity mentions, proportionally, to black, lgbtq+, and jewish people compared to average users, suggesting that leaders on the platform play a role in broadening the discussion to include mentions of marginalized identity groups other than women. we also find more mentions of neurodiversity and mental health in this online community than in a dataset of white supremacist online content, which may be part of a victimhood narrative. the overarching black-pilled ideology of physical appearance determining human worth also extends to talk about incels themselves on incels.is. @xcite also find this "negative self-image" on a precursor forum, which is theorized by @xcite and @xcite . though incels are presented as occupying the lowest status among men, we find fierce gate-keeping around who can claim the identity and its perceived victimhood. this echoes theoretical work by @xcite finding that online communities often disparage less typical members along with out-groups. central users are active in discussions of authenticity. such victimhood could lead "authentic" misogynist incels to pursue symbolic-or materialaction against "fake" incels in the community but also against the perceived unjust system and the women they believe benefit from it. identities constructed in interaction are negoti-ated @xcite ; we find contention around race in inceldom. "white" is associated with both true and fake incels on the platform, often in connection with the folk jbw theory that white men appeal to women of all races. implications for automated hate speech detection central to many hate speech definitions is whether a text denigrates groups based on identity characteristics @xcite @xcite . identity terms are, thus, a major indicator and concern for hate speech detection. in our analysis of identity construction on incels.is, we confirm that mentions of men and women identity terms are much more frequent than in a similar source of unlabeled hate speech: white supremacist data. incel texts, then, may be a good source of unlabeled or annotated data for misogyny detection. the dangerous black-pilled ideology in particular is missing from current misogyny datasets @xcite . such data should be considered, but the broader issue is a need for subject matter expertise in building such datasets for automated hate speech detection. experts should be consulted to know where to look for training data so that specific types of hateful movements, with lexical or other linguistic innovations, are not overlooked. we find that almost 30% of identity mentions in our dataset involve community-specific neologisms, often derogatory terms against women. training hate speech classifiers on data that does not include these terms hinders the ability to detect this substantial source of contemporary online misogyny. our analysis also draws attention to the ideological associations being made with identities in this discourse space. we find problematic stereotypes against not only women, but also lgbtq+, black, and jewish people. thus, incel text data is not only a source of misogyny, but also reflects broader trends related to the mainstreaming of far-right beliefs. particularly pernicious is a black-pilled ideology that physical appearance determines human value, a reinforcement and extension of essentialized gender and racial hierarchies. hence, fatphobia, homophobia, ableism, and racism are all wrapped up in misogynist incel content. automatically detecting this broader ideology may be unattainable or extremely difficult with machine learning techniques, but we emphasize practitioners and researchers should be aware of this ideol-ogy. a narrow focus on hate against women from these communities will miss these important-and increasing-trends toward politicization and hate against other groups. ## conclusion and future work the incel movement and the collective identity around it is a relatively new expression of male supremacism. in this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis techniques to investigate how identities are constructed in discourse on one of the largest incel forums. we study the identity group mention frequency over time, as well as actions and attributes associated with them. we find that talk about women and men dominates identity mentions on this forum, though mentions of marginalized identities commonly targeted by far-right groups increase from 2017-2021, appearing in textual contexts that propagate stereotypes. many of these mentions use novel, community-specific identity terms that would be missed with generic lists of identities or hate speech training data from other contexts. future work could systematically evaluate the ability of existing hate speech classifiers to handle this jargon, as well as the particularly dangerous black-pilled ideology. this ideology is apparent in discussions of identities, including in-group ones, that reinforce rigid physical hierarchies based on attractiveness, gender, and race. we find race is a site of contention in discussions of who are "true" incels. gatekeeping around incel authenticity is common. negotiation around race and inceldom, as well as intersectional racism and misogyny in incel forums would be a fruitful avenue for future work. this dataset could also be compared with other incel discussions, such as incels.me and earlier banned subreddits r/incels and r/braincels. the role of platform affordances and informal mentorship on the platform could be further investigated, as @xcite mapped different user pathways in and out of r/theredpill. further network analysis could reveal how the behaviors we identify, including a rise in mentions of marginalized and political identities, were spread in this community and why.