Background:
There is a rising movement of people who identify as “incels,”
–shorthand for “involuntary celibates.” This is a growing group of people (primarily
men) who believe that they are oppressed by society’s strict status quos and
norms that effectively prohibit the ugly or socially awkward from having sex. What
began as a type of online support group for the dateless morphed into forums
for misogyny and hate. With some veins of influence from the alt-right and
sexism, incel networks are a growing danger, specifically for women. The
extremist views of incels are often developed over time, and online networks
use radicalization techniques not unlike those of ISIS and other extremist
groups to gradually groom men to ascribe to extreme views about women. More and
more, the hate speech and online vitriol is translating into physical violence.
There have been several terrorist attacks against women, like the 2014 University
of California Santa Barbara killing
spree[1],
a Toronto
van attack[2], and
the 2018 gunning of a Tallahassee
yoga studio[3].
There is fairly little research on incel networks to date, with
merely a few Vox articles sparking interest in the public. The ascension of the
network is interesting, because the original founder of the incel movement lost
control of the narrative long ago and the network morphed from support for
people who felt ostracized into an echo chamber that blamed women, ironically the
object of the incels’ desires, for their inability to connect with them. There
is a great deal of crossover between incels and fringe-right forums like 4chan,
which may lend some insight into how extreme ideas develop and how incels have
broadened their network and reach so quickly.
There are several research questions that I hope to address using
Social Network Analysis to study this topic:
- Who are the current leaders/voices in the incel communities?
- Are there sub-communities (cliques) within broader incel networks? What types of connections do they have with the leaders of the broader communities?
- Are there incel cliques within other types of extremist networks (like alt-right networks)?
- How have incel networks grown over the past ~20 years?
- What other networks do they overlap with? Are incels actively recruiting from these other networks or is there a common set of interests that naturally pulls people in from alt-right networks?
- How are incels radicalized? How long does it take for incels to become radicalized? What type of media garners the highest amount of influence/interaction?
Networks:
These Reddit-based networks will be most important,
including: alt-right networks, “manosphere” networks, white supremacy networks.
Since we tend to know more about alt-right and white supremacy networks,
betweenness and degree measures between these and incel networks will be
crucial to understanding the spread of extremist messaging and the radicalization
of incels. Centralization will be particularly critical to learning how many
sources of information there are in the networks. This will hopefully help
sites with content moderation as well as provide valuable information for law
enforcement. Countering the narratives of incel leaders is important, but it
will be crucial to figure out who these leaders are first.
Data and Methodology:
While there is not extensive data on incels, their forums do
collect data in informal polls. This Vox article[4]
cites the Braincels forum’s poll data as well as other forums’ polling data,
which I believe I can obtain by contacting the author Zack Beauchamp. Another
preexisting dataset is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch group’s logs from an incels.co
Discord server, an online chat platform favored by gamers, from the day after
the Toronto attack.[5]
Beyond this, I plan to resort to scraping social media data,
primarily from Reddit, one of the most highly-used platforms for incel networks.
By determining which users span across forums, as well as how many posts the
users make, we will be able to target the sources of influence. This combined
with qualitative research on the potency of the posts (as measured by slurs,
hate speech, allusions to violence, scaling all the way up to direct threats)
will lend some insight into how escalation and radicalization happen over time.
Additionally, scraping data for references praising known
incel terrorists who have committed terror crimes such as Elliot Rodger, Alek
Minassian, and Scott Beierle will expose a baseline of terrorist sympathizers.
Why Social Network Analysis:
Social Network Analysis is the best method to use to answer
these questions because it is crucial to trace the spread and reach of information
through terrorist networks and learn how to break up the network. SNA will
allow me to observe the overlap between networks and see if any insights can be
gained by observing the content generated by the forums. Online forums do
present new obstacles, however, because it is difficult if not impossible to
trace the connections or directionality within a forum. One potential workaround
is to assign directionality based on likes and comments / responses made to an
original post.
1 comment:
Fascinating!What will help you is to have an overall research question, one that comprises all the sub-questions in your bullets. This will give you some structure, and it will also help you manage the scope of your research. The data may pose some challenges, but you seem to have a handle on where to get it. I really look forward to seeing this develop.
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