incel community
Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model for Detecting and Predicting Extremist Traits and Radicalization
Lahnala, Allison, Varadarajan, Vasudha, Flek, Lucie, Schwartz, H. Andrew, Boyd, Ryan L.
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately characterize extremism in more generalizable terms remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a novel method for extracting and analyzing extremist discourse across a range of online community forums. By focusing on verbal behavioral signatures of extremist traits, we develop a framework for quantifying extremism at both user and community levels. Our research identifies 11 distinct factors, which we term ``The Extremist Eleven,'' as a generalized psychosocial model of extremism. Applying our method to various online communities, we demonstrate an ability to characterize ideologically diverse communities across the 11 extremist traits. We demonstrate the power of this method by analyzing user histories from members of the incel community. We find that our framework accurately predicts which users join the incel community up to 10 months before their actual entry with an AUC of $>0.6$, steadily increasing to AUC ~0.9 three to four months before the event. Further, we find that upon entry into an extremist forum, the users tend to maintain their level of extremism within the community, while still remaining distinguishable from the general online discourse. Our findings contribute to the study of extremism by introducing a more holistic, cross-ideological approach that transcends traditional, trait-specific models.
- Europe > France > Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur > Bouches-du-Rhône > Marseille (0.04)
- Asia > Middle East > Israel (0.04)
- Asia > Middle East > Iran (0.04)
- (12 more...)
- Research Report > New Finding (1.00)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (1.00)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety > Terrorism (1.00)
- Law (0.93)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Psychiatry/Psychology (0.93)
- (3 more...)
A Lexicon for Studying Radicalization in Incel Communities
Klein, Emily, Golbeck, Jennifer
Incels are an extremist online community of men who believe in an ideology rooted in misogyny, racism, the glorification of violence, and dehumanization. In their online forums, they use an extensive, evolving cryptolect - a set of ingroup terms that have meaning within the group, reflect the ideology, demonstrate membership in the community, and are difficult for outsiders to understand. This paper presents a lexicon with terms and definitions for common incel root words, prefixes, and affixes. The lexicon is text-based for use in automated analysis and is derived via a Qualitative Content Analysis of the most frequent incel words, their structure, and their meaning on five of the most active incel communities from 2016 to 2023.
- North America > United States > Vermont > Chittenden County > Burlington (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Oxfordshire > Oxford (0.04)
- North America > United States > Texas > El Paso County > El Paso (0.04)
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- Law Enforcement & Public Safety > Terrorism (0.94)
- Law (0.90)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area (0.69)
- Education (0.68)
Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum
Yoder, Michael Miller, Perry, Chloe, Brown, David West, Carley, Kathleen M., Pruden, Meredith L.
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-dot-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.
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania > Allegheny County > Pittsburgh (0.28)
- North America > United States > Michigan > Washtenaw County > Ann Arbor (0.14)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- (12 more...)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety > Terrorism (0.69)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area (0.68)
- Information Technology (0.68)
- Law > Civil Rights & Constitutional Law (0.46)
Semantic Knowledge Discovery and Discussion Mining of Incel Online Community: Topic modeling
Jelodar, Hamed, Frank, Richard
Online forums provide a unique opportunity for online users to share comments and exchange information on a particular topic. Understanding user behaviour is valuable to organizations and has applications for social and security strategies, for instance, identifying user opinions within a community or predicting future behaviour. Discovering the semantic aspects in Incel forums are the main goal of this research; we apply Natural language processing techniques based on topic modeling to latent topic discovery and opinion mining of users from a popular online Incel discussion forum. To prepare the input data for our study, we extracted the comments from Incels.co. The research experiments show that Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on NLP models can be effective for semantic and emotion knowledge discovery and retrieval of useful information from the Incel community. For example, we discovered semantic-related words that describe issues within a large volume of Incel comments, which is difficult with manual methods.
- North America > Canada > Ontario > Toronto (0.14)
- Asia > Middle East > Israel (0.04)
- Asia > China > Jiangsu Province > Nanjing (0.04)
- (3 more...)