Male incels and their 'malignant' digital underworld revealed in new CCDH study
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- A new CCDH study used machine learning to analyze over a million posts on incel forums for 18 months.
- On popular incel forums, members post about rape nearly every half an hour, the study says.
- Incels, short for "Involuntary Celibate," describe men who resent being unable to get a romantic or sexual partner.
On online incel forums, members post about rape nearly every half an hour, according to a new study into the online "incelosphere."
The study, produced by the Center for Countering Digital Hate's Quant lab, used machine learning to study over a million posts on the world's most popular incel forums over the past 18 months.
Incels, short for "Involuntary Celibate," is used to describe members of an online subculture of people who often hold misogynistic views and resent being unable to get a romantic or sexual partner.
It found that sexual violence against women was a common theme in the dataset.
The word "rape" and variations on it were used every 29 minutes, on average, in the posts collected. These words appeared in 18,530 posts made by 1,583 users, according to the study.
On the forums, there were 550 threads containing variations of the word "rape" in the title. Many of these threads, the study said, glorified sexual violence.
Analysis of comments on two of these threads found overwhelming support among the users for rape. The study shows that 89% of those responding, who had a position on the issue, were in support of rape. Only 5% disagreed with rape, the study said, with one user saying they disapproved of the criminal act because it is too "unimaginative."
Several users expressed a wish to commit rape, according to the study.
The study also found that a network of four sites founded by two people offers pathways to becoming an incel. The main forum, central to the network, has millions of visits but just 4,000 active members, the study said.
It also found that, in addition to rape, posts promoted pedophilia and used racist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ language, and discussed mass shootings.
In an introduction to the study, CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed said: "Incels are dangerous to themselves and to others."
"They are a highly-developed example of the kinds of modern digital communities, based on malignant ideologies, pseudoscience, misinformation, and hate that proliferate and are enabled by unregulated online businesses to cause our societies serious harm."
The CCDH is now recommending that Google de-rank "incelosphere" websites in search results for terms connected with inceldom, body image, suicide, and unemployment. It also recommends, among other things, that social media platforms address digital harms such as body image and mental health that can drive children into "incelosphere" communities.
A rambling manifesto that lashed out at women
Facebook/Elliot Rodger
In August 2021, Jake Davidson shot five people - including a three-year-old girl - with a pump-action shotgun before killing himself in Plymouth, South England.
In a series of YouTube videos that Davidson published, he described himself as an "incel," a "virgin," and "socially isolated." He complained about a lack of interaction with women and said he was "defeated by life."
Elliot Rodger - the misogynist killer who became the first hero of the incel movement. He killed six people and injured 14 before turning his gun on himself after a mass shooting outside a sorority house at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2014.
He left a rambling manifesto that lashed out at women, whom he felt had declared war on him by refusing him sex and love.