Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum

Michael Yoder, Chloe Perry, David Brown, Kathleen Carley, Meredith Pruden


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.
Anthology ID:
2023.woah-1.1
Original:
2023.woah-1.1v1
Version 2:
2023.woah-1.1v2
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Yi-ling Chung, Paul R{\"ottger}, Debora Nozza, Zeerak Talat, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.woah-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.woah-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Yoder, Chloe Perry, David Brown, Kathleen Carley, and Meredith Pruden. 2023. Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum. In The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 1–13, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum (Yoder et al., WOAH 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.woah-1.1.pdf