Incels: Frustrated and Angry due to Deprivation of Intimacy : A Case Study of the Radicalisation Trajectories of an Online Community on a Fringe Social Media Platform

Technological advancements and affordability enable voicing of social injustice, feelings of deprivation, and oppression. Spatial barriers no longer pose obstacles to connecting with like-minded (or dissimilar) others to define and refine ingroup and outgroup. Some scholars anticipate that the internet liberates the discussion of opinions, others claim social networking platforms play a role in the polarisation of the public by creating echo chambers. However, it is recognised that ideas, ideologies, and social movements spread across the internet at an unprecedented pace. Connecting with others with whom one shares deprivation in a support network offers a sense of belonging. Broad scholarly literature addresses opinion polarisation and potential radicalisation in online social media platforms. However, quantifying radicalisation trajectories in fringe online communities like the misogynist incels are still to be done. In this thesis I study the online presence of the incel community. Incels are mostly young men who feel stigmatised and need to hide their incel existence. Incels voice their feelings of deprivation of a relationship and sex with a willing partner. This unfulfilled masculinity and sense of entitlement to sex cause frustration and anger which are vented in online forums blaming primarily women and feminism. Calls for action to social change, even for violence is common. However, incels do not unanimously consider violence a solution, many demonstrate the tame side of the so-called blackpilled mindset, the acceptance of powerlessness, and nihilism. Regardless, some scholars view the community as potentially dangerous to society, labelling them as terrorists. This study investigates whether participating registered users of the Incels.is website display increasing tendency toward expressing utterances with the themes of misogyny, harassment, nihilism, and moral outrage in their posted messages, and whether users gradually become more aligned with the general perception of incels in previous scholarly work. In other words, this work tests whether active participation increases the frequency of utterances of misogyny, harassment, and moral outrage, thus demonstrating a radicalisation tendency or increased nihilism. To answer the research question, I first scraped the Incels.is website, and retained ~5.38M posts published over 4 years for analysis. Next, a subset of posts was manually labelled to train a supervised text classification model (BERT). Finally, the results of the classification task were complemented with Ordinary Least Squares regression (n = 4623). The analyses uncover temporal user-level radicalisation trajectories, and increased nihilism. More specifically, the duration of active participation (in days) and the number of posted messages positively predict the count of moral outrage, misogynistic, harassing, and nihilistic content