Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube
AAre Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence fromReddit and YouTube
ROBIN MAMIÉ, MANOEL HORTA RIBEIRO, and ROBERT WEST,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Researchers have suggested that “the Manosphere,” a conglomerate of men-centered online communities, may serve as a gateway tofar right movements. In that context, this paper quantitatively studies the migratory patterns between a variety of groups withinthe Manosphere and the Alt-right, a loosely connected far right movement that has been particularly active in mainstream socialnetworks. 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 and2018. In addition to subreddits related to the communities of interest, we also collect data on counterparts: other groups of users whichwe use for comparison (e.g., for YouTube we use a set of media channels). Besides measuring the similarity in the commenting userbases of these communities, we perform a migration study, calculating to which extent users in the Manosphere gradually engagewith Alt-right content. Our results suggest that there is a large overlap between the user bases of the Alt-right and of the Manosphereand 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 theManosphere. Members of some communities (e.g., Men’s Rights Activists) gradually engage with the Alt-right significantly morethan 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 mayinform platforms’ policies and moderation decisions regarding these communities. Code and reproducibility data are available at:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4420983.
INTRODUCTION
A conglomerate of online communities broadly referred to as “the Manosphere” has received increased attention fromscholars (e.g., [17, 40]) and the media (e.g., [12, 43]). According to Lily [29], these communities are united by a belief ina “crisis in masculinity” caused by feminists and feminist ideology. Although the roots of these communities can betraced back to the “Men’s Rights Movements” created in the 1970s [35], recent instances of online harassment [23] andreal-world violence [9] highlight their impact on society.As these communities flourished on mainstream and fringe platforms [40], a chief concern that emerged fromresearchers is the link between the Manosphere and other fringe groups, including White Supremacist and Identitarianmovements [22]. These connections would make the Manosphere fertile recruiting grounds for known violent extremistgroups, but also suggest the emergence of a new form of extremism [10]. Not coincidentally, in 2018, the term “MaleSupremacy” started being tracked as an ideology by both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC) [44] and the NationalConsortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) [45].The notion that the heterogeneous roster of Manosphere-related communities would act as a “gateway” or a “pipeline”to fringe world views resonates with previous research on the role of contrarian communities on YouTube. Accordingto Lewis [27], the proximity between content creators on YouTube—which not only share the same platform but oftenengage in public debate—could create “radicalization pathways” on the website. These radicalization pathways werequantitatively studied by Ribeiro et al. [41], who showed that members of other online communities, such as theso-called Alt-lite, consistently migrated to channels espousing more extreme views. a r X i v : . [ c s . C Y ] F e b re-print, Mamié et al. In this context, the importance of quantitatively studying the migration patterns between the Manosphere and thefar right is twofold. First, it contributes to our large-scale understanding of fringe communities and their connections.Previous work has mapped the evolution of the different groups within the Manosphere [40], producing a data-driven history of these (mostly anonymous) communities. In a similar fashion, understanding alleged migrations fromManosphere communities can help us make sense of complicated online ecosystem. Second, it is a continuation of aneffort to identify and characterize communities that are gateways to extremism [27, 41]. Although qualitative evidencefor the link between the Manosphere and the far right are plenty [10, 22], we argue that it is important to quantify thestrength of this link and to compare it with previous known gateway communities (e.g., the Alt-lite). The Manosphereis a wide and heterogeneous set of communities, which range from Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) who claim thatsociety is rigged against men to Involuntary Celibates (Incels) who believe to be destined to a life of romantic rejection.Different groups within the Manosphere may have different links to the far right, and quantifying these ties mayprecisely inform platforms’ policies and moderation decisions.
Present work.
In this paper, we investigate the link between various communities in the Manosphere and the Alt-right.We analyze two large datasets containing digital traces of these communities, derived from Reddit and YouTube. Overall,our analysis encompasses over 106 million comments across 624 YouTube channels and over 235 million comments andthreads made across over 115 subreddits. These datasets are expanded versions of previously available data [40, 41].Leveraging these comprehensive snapshots, we analyze, within each platform, the similarity between the commentinguser bases of the Alt-right and the different communities within the Manosphere. We compare these results withcarefully chosen counterparts: in the case of Reddit, randomly sampled set of users, and in the case of YouTube, userswho commented in a predefined set of media channels. Additionally, we dig deeper and perform a migration studyto examine the extent to which users in Manosphere communities gradually engage with Alt-right content, againcomparing our results with counterparts.Overall, we find that for several communities, across platforms, the overlap between users in the Manosphere andthe Alt-right is substantial and that it is common for users who once commented exclusively in the Manosphere toeventually also engage with Alt-right content. These results, however, are heterogeneous within the Manosphereand across the two websites. For example, not only did the user base of the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)community become increasingly similar to that of the Alt-right in recent years on YouTube; on Reddit, too, membersof the MGTOW community migrated to Alt-right subreddits more expressively than the counterpart (and even thanpreviously studied gateway communities, such as the Alt-lite [41]). However, for other communities, such as Pick UpArtists (PUAs), user base similarity and migration are not substantial (again, as compared to a counterpart).We argue that these findings strengthen the concerns raised by some researchers [10, 44], and have the potentialto guide more fine-grained research into the links between misogynistic and far right movements. Additionally, webelieve that the detailed breakdown of the relationship between different communities within the Manosphere and theAlt-right can empower platforms to craft better policies and take better moderation decisions. We use Lilly’s [29] division of the Manosphere, also adopted by Ribeiro et al. [40], which divides the manosphere into four broad groups: Men GoingTheir Own Way (MGTOWs), Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), Involuntary Celibates (Incels) and Pick Up Artists (PUAs).2 re Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube Pre-print,
A growing body of research has studied both the Manosphere and far right movements online. We briefly discuss therelevant literature, emphasizing quantitative work done in either Reddit or YouTube (the platforms we analyze in thispaper). We also provide background information regarding the fringe communities of interest.We are mainly interested in two sets of communities for the purpose of this work: the Manosphere and the farright. Both these groups are known to be decentralized and full of contradictions. For example, far right groups can beeither Christian or Paganistic [16], and within the Manosphere, some communities perceive a “crisis in masculinity”stemming from the feminization of society, while others due to the feminization of men [29]. Also, the nature of theonline activity of different communities within the far right and the Manosphere differs. For example, far right groupsthat openly embrace Nazi symbols and ideology are usually not present on websites (e.g., Reddit and YouTube) andprefer anonymous or self-governed platforms such as Telegram channels [50] or standalone forums [7]. In that context,we limit our scope of research to five communities that are known to prosper (or, in some cases, have prospered) on theplatforms analyzed [2, 40], which we describe in detail in Table 1. Four of these communities belong to the Manosphere,and the Alt-right serves as the representative of far right movements.
Far right movements online.
The far right presence online can be traced back to the 1990s, when
Stormfront emerged,first as a bulletin board, and then as a fully-fledged white supremacist website [46]. Yet, it was with the advent ofmainstream social networks, that online far right communities, most notably the Alt-right, have gained the spotlight.The movement had its online presence spread around subreddits (e.g., r/AltRight, r/FrenWorld), YouTube channels (e.g.,James Allsup), anonymous imageboards (e.g., 4chan, 8chan), and alternative platforms (e.g., Gab, voat.co). The movementwas involved in notorious events such as the Christchurch terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand [51], andthe Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in the United States [4]. The Alt-right and fringe platforms associated withit were extensively studied by researchers over the last few years. Previous research includes large-scale analyses of4chan [6, 20], Gab [34, 53], and specific subreddits associated with the Alt-right [15, 18]. We here make a distinctionbetween Alt-right and Alt-lite [2]. The term Alt-lite was created to differentiate right-wing activists who deny embracingwhite supremacist ideology. According to Atkinson [4], this distinction was exacerbated by the Unite the Right Rally inCharlottesville, which revealed the white supremacist leanings and affiliations to the general public.
Manosphere.
The Manosphere and communities within it have been previously studied in Reddit, YouTube, andstandalone websites. Farell et al. have explored the use of misogyny across Manosphere-related subreddits [14] as wellas extensively characterized their jargon with computational and socio-linguistic techniques [13]. Ribeiro et al. [40]have mapped the evolution of the Manosphere across Reddit and several standalone websites, showing that newer andmore toxic communities such as Men Going Their Own Way and Incels are overshadowing older communities suchas Pick Up Artists and Men’s Rights Activists. Studies focusing on specific communities within the Manosphere in agiven platform include Papadamou et al. [38]’s investigation of Incel related content on YouTube, and LaViolette andHoogan’s [26] careful analysis of the platform signals to distinguish the discourse in r/MensRights and r/MensLib , twogroups with very different views on masculinity and feminism. Overall, research on fringe movements and communities(related both to the Manosphere and the far right) stresses that the influence of these communities is not limitedto real-world incidents. Although “niche,” these communities have a disparate influence on our online informationecosystem and are deeply associated with a variety of anti-social behavior online [10, 15, 54]. re-print, Mamié et al. Table 1. Brief taxonomy of the communities relevant to this study.
Community DescriptionMen’s Rights Activists(MRA)
Men’s right activists often define themselves as a group focused on men-related so-cial issues and on how institutions consistently discriminate against men [8]. Yet, themovement has been repeatedly called out due to its misogynistic rhetoric [31], and theirrequests have been labeled “vengeful” by some researchers [11, 32], demanding, for ex-ample, the recognition that men are equally or more victimized by domestic violencethan women [32].
Men Going Their Own Way(MGTOW)
A mostly online community that advocates that men should part ways with women andsociety, which has been harmed beyond recovery by feminism [52]. Ribeiro et al. [40]have shown that, on Reddit, the community was created by users who used to participatein Men’s Right Activists subreddits. Yet, unlike MRAs, they believe that the system isimpossible to change, and the solution is to “go your own way” [30].
Pick Up Artists(PUA)
Pick up artists are a community centered around the idea of “the Game,” strategies thatwould help men pick up women [29]. Many of the techniques promoted by members of thecommunity either objectify or harass women. For example, they employ a constellationof techniques to deal with “last-minute resistance to sex,” encouraging men to bypasssigns of lack of consent [37].
Involuntary Celibates(Incels)
Incels are a movement, mostly of young men, united by a strong feeling of rejectionand rage towards the opposite sex [48]. The community abides by the so-called “blackpill,” the idea that your looks are the only determinant in a successful romantic life [21].According to that view, those who do not conform to society’s beauty standards aredoomed to a life of loneliness and rejection.
Alt-right
A loose segment of the white supremacist movement with a substantial online presenceon websites such as 4chan, and in certain corners of YouTube and Reddit [1]. The presenceof this community on mainstream platforms has been substantially reduced in recentyears due to systematic banning [19, 39].
Online radicalization.
Much of the research on online radicalization focused on characterizing the activity of Jihadistrecruitment and propaganda in mainstream Online Social Networks [24, 25]. More recently, radicalization in the contextof the Alt-right has also been studied. As previously mentioned, Lewis suggested that, on YouTube, the proximitybetween alternative content creators within the platform could create “radicalization pathways.” These were empiricallyverified by Ribeiro et al. [41], who have shown that users that engaged in channels from so-called “gateway communities”would consistently migrate to Alt-right content. The mechanisms governing these radicalization pathways on YouTubehave been extensively discussed: while many suggest that YouTube’s algorithm would be “the great radicalizer” [3, 49],others have pointed out that radicalization could be driven by novel technological affordances [36] and social dynamicson the platform [28].
Our cross-platform analysis leverages data from both YouTube and Reddit. Some of the data employed stems fromprevious work, while other was collected with methodology mimicking that of previous work. Detailed information ofour data including the name of the channels and subreddits and data collection logs are provided in an online appendix. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A0BIVsxb7JFkt-deaoCSy65XdIsQfkn8z33i3OHLfOI/edit?usp=sharing4 re Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube Pre-print, Table 2. Overview of the YouTube data used in this paper. Categories marked with a ∗ were obtained from [41]. For brevity’s sake, weomit the keyphrases used in the categories from [41]. Category ∗ ∗ ∗
14B 208936 66 21M —Incel 0.5M 3526 42 0.4M black pill, incels, looksmaxMGTOW 3M 18749 79 4.6M red pill, MGTOW, hypergamyMRA 1.7M 5678 33 1.5M mra, men’s rights, father’s rightsPUA 3.1B 28216 124 6M daygame, Indicator of Interest, PUATotal 21.4B 349860 526 87M
To study YouTube, we expand the dataset obtained from [41]. We leverage the same methodology to collect dataassociated with 4 groups in the Manosphere: Incels, PUAs, MGTOWs, and MRAs. The overall data collection processwas performed between the 20th and the 28th of May 2019. The methodology consisted of three steps, detailed below.
Creating a pool of channels.
For each of the four communities of interest, we create a pool of candidate channels asfollows. We started with a set of seed channels extracted from a variety of sources, blog posts, and wikis. Then, wedevised a set of key phrases associated with each community (e.g. for Incels, the keywords were black pill , incels , and looksmax , we provide a complete list of the keywords used for each community in Table 2). For each keyphrase, weuse YouTube’s search functionality and consider the first 200 results in English. We inspected each result and decidedwhether to add the channel to the pool of candidate channels. Finally, we iteratively collected "related" and "featured"channels (a now disabled feature on YouTube), on all the channels obtained in steps (1) and (2); This is done twice.
Annotating the channels.
Once all candidate channels were collected, we had two annotators label them carefully.Annotators had previous experience with the communities at hand, and had to watch, for each channel, at least 5minutes of content. The whole annotation period lasted for 3 weeks in May 2019, and the annotator agreement was91.8%. In the end, we obtained a pool of 279 channels, out of which 32 were Incel-related, 80 MGTOW-related, 33MRA-related, and 124 PUA-related.
Collecting the data.
Lastly, for each channel, we collect the number of subscribers and views, and for their videos,all the comments. Notice that we use data along with the YouTube data published by Ribeiro et al. [41], which wascaptured in a similar fashion. We depict statistics for both datasets in Table 2.
To study Reddit, we expand the dataset obtained from Ribeiro et al. [40]. There, subreddits associated with theManosphere were collected and curated into the categories of interest. We enrich this data with Alt-right-relatedsubreddits using the same methodology, which we describe below.
Creating a pool of (Alt-right) subreddits.
We created a pool of subreddits by analyzing two subreddits that attemptto take action against hateful subreddits: r/AgainstHateSubreddit and r/AntifascistsofReddit . We manually analyzed allsubmissions of these two subreddits containing the term "Alt-right," and briefly inspected them, and if appropriate,designated them as candidate channels. Additionally, we also collect two sets of counterparts. First, we collect allcomments and submissions belonging to 17 popular Gaming subreddits: gaming online communities are known to be re-print, Mamié et al. Table 3. Overview of the Reddit data used in this paper. Categories marked with a ∗ were obtained from [40]. Category ∗
18 197,194 349,711 5,075,962MGTOW ∗ ∗
10 214,011 219,809 3,989,282PUA ∗ male-dominated and provide a nice point of comparison [33]. These were randomly sampled from the list of top 100gaming subreddits available in the r/gaming community . Second, we collect a sample of random sample of 0.5% ofall Reddit posts available through Pushshift. As we discuss later, these different counterparts will be used in differentanalyses. Annotating the subreddits.
After creating the pool of 65 subreddits, we spent a week in January 2021 carefullyinspecting each one of them for at least 3 minutes and annotating them as either belonging to the Alt-right or not.When subreddits were banned (which was often the case), we resorted to the Internet Archive to browse historicalsnapshots.
Collecting the data.
We ended up with a pool of 59 subreddits, from which we collected all available data usingPushshift [5]. Notice that we use this data along with the Reddit data published with [40]. We depict statistics for bothdatasets in Table 3.
Our analyses employ counterparts: other groups of users which we use for comparison. For YouTube, we use thechannels classified as “media” by Ribeiro et al. [41], and for Reddit, we use a set of gaming subreddits and a set ofrandom comments. We avoid referring to these comparison groups as “controls,” due to the term’s causal nature, whichdoes not hold in the observational setting we study. Nevertheless, as indicated by Rosenbaum [42], “if counterparts aregoverned by the same laws or forces as treated and control groups, we may study the operation of those forces in theabsence of treatment by studying the counterparts.”In that sense, we argue that counterparts provide a sanity check on the effect sizes observed across differentcommunities and different platforms. If we observe substantially more overlap or migration between the communitiesof the Manosphere and the Alt-right than between counterparts and the Alt-right, we argue that this constitutesgood evidence of close ties between the Manosphere and the Alt-right. Here, it also helps that we are studying twoindependent platforms: we can be more confident of findings that are “reproducible” both on Reddit and on YouTube.Additionally, in our analyses leveraging YouTube data, we also compare the ties between the Manosphere and theAlt-right with the ties between the Alt-lite and the Alt-right. Migration between the Alt-lite and the Alt-right has beenpreviously studied by Ribeiro et al. [41] and this comparison provides yet another way to assess the effect size of ourresults. If counterparts allow us to compare the Manosphere with communities where we would expect weak ties withthe Alt-right, the Alt-lite allows comparing the Manosphere to a well-known gateway to the far right. re Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube Pre-print, - - N u m b e r o f c o mm e n t s Alt-right - - Manosphere
YouTube Reddit - - N u m b e r o f c o mm e n t s MGTOW - - MRA - - Incel - - PUA
Fig. 1.
Overview of commenting activity:
We depict, for all communities of interest, the number of comments per community onYouTube and Reddit for the indicated periods of time. Notice that we present Manosphere communities both in aggregate (in theupper row) and separately (in the bottom row). For the Alt-lite and the Intellectual Dark Web, we consider only YouTube data.
Fig. 1 depicts the number of comments in each of the communities in both YouTube and Reddit. Across the twoplatforms, the number of comments is very similar for some of the communities within the Manosphere (e.g., MGTOW,MRA), while for others, they differ by orders of magnitude (e.g., PUA, Incels). Additionally, we find the growth of thesedifferent communities varies substantially: while some communities growing substantially during the study period (e.g.MGTOW), others remaining mostly stagnated (e.g. MRA).
We study the user base similarity between different communities using two metrics: the Jaccard similarity | 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵 || 𝐴 ∪ 𝐵 | and the overlap coefficient | 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵 | min ( | 𝐴 | , | 𝐵 |) , where A and B are the set of commenting users in the first, respectivelysecond, community. The overlap coefficient yields fairer results when comparing communities of different sizes since acommunity can be entirely contained within another one, and still yield a relatively low Jaccard similarity score. Fig. 2compares the user base of the Alt-right and the communities in the Manosphere across different years. We provide twoadditional points of comparison. First, on YouTube, we depict the similarity between the Alt-right and the Alt-lite, aknown gateway community to the Alt-right [41]. Second, we report the similarity between each community and thechosen counterparts. For YouTube, we use the media channels collected by Ribeiro et al. [41]. For Reddit, we use therandom sample of comments collected from Pushshift. Since the number of distinct users is significantly bigger in therandom sample, we subsample it to match the size of the community we are comparing it with. The Manosphere and the Alt-right.
The first row of Fig. 2 shows the similarity between the Manosphere and theAlt-right in both YouTube (on the left) and Reddit (on the right). We observe that the Jaccard similarity between theAlt-right and the Manosphere is higher than the one between the Alt-right and the counterpart on YouTube. The gapbetween the two, as well as the overlap coefficient between the Manosphere and the Alt-right, is also growing in recentyears. For example, in 2016, the Jaccard similarity was 4.7% and the overlap 22.5%, while in 2018, these figures have re-print, Mamié et al. Manosphere
YouTube
Overlap [0%,10%)[10%,20%) [20%,30%)[30%,50%) [50%,75%)[75%, 100%] Jaccard Counterpart
MGTOW
MRA
Incel
PUA
Year
Year
Alt-lite
Fig. 2.
Similarity between the user base of the Manosphere and of the Alt-right:
We show the evolution of the Jaccard similarity(the green line) and overlap coefficient (indicated by the background color) between the studied fringe communities —named onthe left— and the Alt-right for both YouTube (on the left) and Reddit (on the right). We additionally show the Jaccard similarity ofthe counterparts (the purple line). Notice that here too, we analyze the Manosphere in aggregate (on the first row) and split in fourcommunities (in rows 2-4). We also depict the similarity between the Alt-Lite and the Alt-right. This is done only for YouTube as wedo have not collected Alt-lite subreddits. grown to 9.5% and 31.7%, respectively. However, we find these numbers to be less expressive than for the Alt-lite, apreviously known gateway community on YouTube (shown in the sixth row). For example, in 2018 the Alt-lite had aJaccard Similarity score of 14.1% and overlap coefficients of 70.5%. On Reddit, we also observe that the Manosphereis consistently more similar to the Alt-right than the randomly sampled counterpart. Here, the Jaccard similarity haslocal maxima in 2010 (9% vs. 3.1% counterpart) and 2016 (7.5% vs. 3.8%). In both these years, the overlap coefficient wasbigger than 20%. re Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube Pre-print, Inside the Manosphere.
We extend our analysis by analyzing the Manosphere communities separately, rather thanin aggregate (as shown in rows 2 to 4). Here, we find that communities behave heterogeneously. On the one hand, inrecent years, MGTOWs and MRAs are significantly more similar to the Alt-right than the counterparts on both YouTubeand Reddit. For example, in 2018 MGTOWs had Jaccard similarity scores of 3.2% on Reddit (vs. 0.05% counterpart) and12.2% on YouTube (vs. 5.6% counterpart). On the other hand, when comparing PUAs and Incels and the counterparts inboth Reddit and YouTube, we find either small differences or that counterparts have higher similarity scores than theManosphere communities. Importantly, notice that this is not merely a consequence of the size of these communities:on YouTube, for example, PUAs were the largest of all communities in terms of number of comments, while Incels werethe smallest (see Fig. 1). Lastly, we also notice that in the founding years of the MGTOW community (when it still wasquite small, with only a couple of hundreds of posts, as shown in Fig. 1), its overlap with the Alt-right was particularlystrong. In 2012, for example, 17 of the 72 active MGTOW members were also active in Alt-right subreddits (23.6%overlap). Previous research has suggested that founding members of the MGTOW community in Reddit were active inthe MRA subreddits [40], and here we find that they also seemed to be active in the Alt-right subreddits studied.
In the previous section, we showed that, in recent years, the commenting user bases of the Manosphere —in particularof the MGTOW and the MRA communities— are becoming increasingly similar to those of the Alt-right. This suggeststhat there is a growing percentage of users consuming both Manosphere and
Alt-right content. Yet, this observationdoes not conclusively indicate if the Manosphere is a “gateway” to the Alt-right: users could join both communities atroughly the same time or migrate from the Alt-right to the Manosphere. To gain more insight into this, we conduct amore fine-grained study. We trace the comment history of YouTube and Reddit users by tagging them in a communityin a given period and follow their actions into the future. To observe migration patterns, we analyze the proportion ofmembers active in a given community at a given time that engaged with Alt-right content in the following years. Theresults for this analysis are shown in Fig. 3. Each column corresponds to a different starting point (2006 to 2012, 2013to 2015, 2016, or 2017), and each row corresponds to a different community. In each plot, we track all users who, in agiven starting point, commented in the community indicated by the row and not in the Alt-right. We then show, forsubsequent periods, what percentage of those users kept posting on the platform and engaged with either Alt-rightchannels (in black) or subreddits (in blue). Importantly, we compare our results with counterparts. For YouTube, weagain use the media channels obtained from Ribeiro et al. [41]. For Reddit, we use the set of 17 gaming subreddits. Weavoid using the random sample of posts here: since sampling was done at the post level, the data does not containcomplete longitudinal data for individual users, which makes the data inappropriate for this analysis.We further clarify this methodology with an example. Consider for example the analysis plot corresponding to theMGTOW community with a starting point in 2016 (second row, third column). First, we select all users who commentedin the MGTOW community in 2016 (and not in the Alt-right). Then, we calculate, for subsequent time periods (here2017 and 2018), the fractions of users that kept posting in all communities being studied that did comment in theAlt-right. On YouTube, for instance, we find that, from the set of users who commented in the MGTOW community in2016, 16.2% and 21.9% of those who remained active went on to engage with Alt-right subreddits in 2017, and 2018respectively. These numbers are significantly larger than the migration observed in the counterparts, shown in thesixth row. We find that for users who in 2016 commented exclusively on media channels (counterparts in the case ofYouTube), less than 10% of users who remained active in subsequent years went on to comment in Alt-right channels. re-print, Mamié et al. Manosphere
Start: 2006-2012
Start: 2013-2015
YouTube YouTube Counterpart Reddit Reddit Counterpart
Start: 2016
Start: 2017
MGTOW
MRA
Incel
PUA
Alt-lite
Fig. 3.
Migration of users towards Alt-right content:
We report the results of a migration analysis performed in all communitiesof interest. We track how users who commented exclusively in a given community (one per rows) in a given starting period (one percolumns) eventually engage with Alt-right content in years to come on both Reddit (in blue) and YouTube (in black). Here we use asmedia channels as YouTube counterparts and gaming subreddits for Reddit (shown as blue and black dotted lines). 95% confidenceintervals are shown are shown by (tiny) error-bars. The plot tracking MGTOW in the period 2006–2012 on Reddit is devoid of anydata points because almost no one is tagged exclusively in this category for this starting period.
Reddit.
Analyzing the migration from the Manosphere towards the Alt-right in Reddit (shown in the first row ofFig. 3), we find that, across the different starting periods, Reddit users of the analyzed Manosphere-related communitiestend to drift towards more extreme content significantly more than their counterparts. This behavior is valid for allstudied communities and all starting periods, but is the strongest for MRAs. For example, for users who exclusivelycommented in MRA subreddits in 2017, around 24% of those who remained active in 2018 went on to comment inAlt-right subreddits (vs. 5% for the counterpart). Considering that the user bases of PUAs and Incels are, in Reddit, lesssimilar to the user base of the Alt-right than MRAs and MGTOWs, it is noteworthy that members of all four manospherecommunities migrate to Alt-right subreddit at similar rates. This suggests that having similar user bases and being agateway to other communities are distinct phenomena. Previous work has suggested that there is widespread migration re Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube Pre-print, also within the Manosphere [40], and it could be that users “indirectly” migrate to the Alt-right. For example, PUAmembers might join the MGTOW community first and then join the Alt-right later. YouTube.
On YouTube, we find mixed results: although the Manosphere migrates to the Alt-right more than thecounterparts, the differences between the two groups are much smaller (Fig. 3, first row). For example, for userswhich we track from 2006–2012, we observe around 15.7% of engagement from uses who initially commented on theManosphere (vs. 13.4% for the counterpart). Although the result is statistically significant (as shown in the CIs), thegap is much smaller than what we observed for Reddit, where the migration to the Alt-right from the Manosphere isroughly twice the migration to the Alt-right from the counterpart. These differences between the observed values andthe counterparts cannot be explained solely by the nature of the websites—forum rather than video platform—becauseour chosen counterparts exhibit very similar patterns on both platforms. When analyzing communities within theManosphere separately, we find that members of the Incel and the PUA communities migrate less to the Alt-right thanmembers of the MRA and MGTOW communities. For example, starting from 2013–2015, we find that 25.1% of userswho initially commented on the MGTOW community migrated to the Alt-right, whereas only 15.2% of users whoinitially commented on the Incel community did so. This finding is more aligned with what we observe in Fig. 2, andsuggests that, on YouTube, the link between the PUA and Incel communities and the Alt-right is weaker.
Alt-lite.
We can also compare the migration between the Manosphere and the Alt-right with the Alt-lite, a previouslystudied gateway community [41]. In aggregate, we find that users migrates migrate from the Manosphere to theAlt-right less often than from the Alt-lite to the Alt-right. For example, for users starting in 2016 in all of the Manospherecommunities, 12.7% of them would eventually migrate to the Alt-right (vs. 15.1% for the Alt-lite). However, consideringManosphere communities separately, we find that MRAs and MGTOWs actually migrate to the Alt-right significantlymore often than members of the Alt-lite. For instance, out of the users starting in 2016 in the MGTOW community,25.1% would eventually migrate to the Alt-right (again, vs. 15.1% for the Alt-lite).
Our analysis suggests that the Manosphere is linked to the Alt-right both via their user bases (Sec. 3) and throughmigration patterns (Sec. 4) of their users over the years. Overall, we believe that the main contributions of this workare: 1) providing quantitative evidence to a claim that has been hypothesized by researchers in recent years [10, 44],and 2) helping in the effort to map the evolution and the ties between fringe communities online [41, 54]. We find thisresult to be consistent across the two platforms studied: YouTube and Reddit. In what follows, we discuss nuances,implications, and limitations of the work at hand.When interpreting the results presented here, it is important to keep in mind that these are ever-changing communitiesand that tracing boundaries is often tricky. Here, we study the links between the communities in Manosphere and theAlt-right. However, it could be argued that the term Alt-right has since become obsolete with the rise of new groupssuch as the Boogaloo and Q-Anon movements. It would be interesting for future work to continue to characterizemigratory flows between these ever-evolving fringe communities.Another limitation of this work is that we focus on studying migratory patterns without trying to explain theircauses. In that context, future work could try to explain why users migrate to the Alt-right. This could be done aqualitative level, by taking a closer look at the data, but also through large-scale analyses: for example, one could try topredict whether a user will do so by the digital traces they produce, such as the language they use. This direction has been explored on Reddit, but not in the context of community migrations [18].11 re-print, Mamié et al.
Within the Manosphere, we observe that different communities have different relationships with the Alt-right. Thisfinding not only resonates with previous work differentiating these communities by their linguistic traces [13], but alsosuggests that not all Manosphere communities are equally problematic. We find that, on both Reddit and YouTube,Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) were consistently linked with the Alt-right,both in terms of their user-base similarity and in terms of the migratory patterns observed. This is not the case for theother two Manosphere communities studied, Incels and Pick Up Artists (PUA). This finding is in stark contrast with thedisparate focus on the alleged pipeline from Incels to the Alt-right [38, 47]. While the ties between Incel ideology andmale supremacist terrorist attacks [9] should continue to be explored, our research suggests that stakeholders shouldalso investigate influence of MGTOWs and MRAs on our online information ecosystem.A second implication of the work at hand has to do with the role of recommender systems in online radicalization, atopic that has been extensively discussed in previous research [36, 41]. Here, we find that there was migration fromManosphere communities both on YouTube, a platform largely driven by automatic recommendations, and on Reddit, aplatform governed by more transparent mechanisms (e.g., upvote, karma, etc.). Also, we find that migration across allof the communities in the Manosphere to the Alt-right is substantially more prevalent on Reddit than on YouTube. Weargue that this constitutes evidence towards the hypothesis that online radicalization can happen independently ofrecommender systems (as suggested for example, by Munger and Phillips [36]).
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