YouTube and Reddit users who engage with anti-feminist content can become radicalised to subscribe to alt-right beliefs, according to an analysis of 300 million comments on each platform.
Manoel Ribeiro and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne analysed the comments posted to 115 Reddit forums and 526 YouTube channels between 2006 and 2018 to see whether there was overlap between communities that expressed hate towards women, sometimes dubbed the 鈥渕anosphere鈥�, and alt-right groups.
Ribeiro wanted to investigate potential ties because of media coverage connecting people who self-describe as 鈥渋nvoluntarily celibate鈥�, also known as 鈥渋ncels鈥�, to mass shootings 鈥� of murdering 10 people in Toronto, Canada, in 2018. 鈥淲hen the media covers these communities, they associate incels with the far right,鈥� says Ribeiro. 鈥淐an we find evidence for that?鈥�
Advertisement
The researchers tracked the type of content each user engaged with, looking at general news, manosphere and alt-right content. They conducted separate research on Reddit and YouTube, rather than trying to identify people crossing between the two. The forums and channels investigated were chosen as they have been associated with anti-feminist and alt-right groups in prior academic work.
The team divided anti-feminist groups into four categories: members of the anti-feminist, male-separatist group Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), men鈥檚 rights activists, incels, and 鈥減ick-up artists鈥�, who share strategies for convincing women to have sex with them. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of anti-feminism in the far right, and I think this resonates with these anti-women communities,鈥� says Ribeiro.
To look for evidence of radicalisation, the team looked at people who in 2016 commented on YouTube videos classified as anti-feminist, and on general news videos, but had no engagement with alt-right videos and compared this with what they were doing in 2018. MGTOW members were most likely to later engage with alt-right content: by 2018, 21.9 per cent had begun commenting on alt-right videos, while less than 10 per cent of general news commenters had migrated to alt-right videos.
Despite the media鈥檚 connection between incels and alt-right beliefs, incels were least likely to turn up in alt-right communities, with 15.2 per cent of those who commented on incel videos in 2016 ending up engaging with alt-right content in 2018.
The team鈥檚 analysis of Reddit found similar results, but in general migration from the manosphere to the alt-right was higher on Reddit than YouTube. In 2018, the alt-right on YouTube and Reddit comprised almost 850,000 users, while the manosphere on both sites was 1.5 million people strong.
鈥淭hese communities were allowed to grow for a very long time, with platforms having a very lax moderation policy,鈥� says Jacob Johanssen of St Mary鈥檚 University, London, who has previously analysed the manosphere.
YouTube told New 杏吧原创 that its policy is to remove content that promotes violence or extremism. The company declined to answer specific questions about the research. Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.
Johanssen says the team鈥檚 research does seem to show a strong link between the manosphere and the alt-right, but he warns that it is difficult to identify varied communities as a single mass. 鈥淭hese communities are very heterogenous in themselves,鈥� he says. 鈥淪pecifically with incels, there isn鈥檛 one incel community.鈥�
Ribeiro hopes investigating the content of the comments posted may help understand the causal routes of radicalisation, in the hope of preventing people moving into more violent fringe groups. 鈥淎 lot of these communities are benefitting from the fact they鈥檙e in these mainstream platforms for a long time,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t raises questions of how to spot these problematic questions quickly and take action.鈥�
Reference:
