"How over is it?" Understanding the Incel Community on YouTube

Abstract: YouTube is by far the largest host of user-generated video content worldwide. Alas, the platform also hosts inappropriate, toxic, and hateful content. One community that has often been linked to sharing and publishing hateful and misogynistic content is the so-called Involuntary Celibates (Incels), a loosely defined movement ostensibly focusing on men's issues. In this paper, we set out to analyze the Incel community on YouTube by focusing on this community's evolution over the last decade and understanding whether YouTube's recommendation algorithm steers users towards Incel-related videos. We collect videos shared on Incel communities within Reddit and perform a data-driven characterization of the content posted on YouTube. Among other things, we find that the Incel community on YouTube is getting traction and that during the last decade, the number of Incel-related videos and comments rose substantially. We also find that users have a 6.3% chance of being suggested an Incel-related video by YouTube's recommendation algorithm within five hops when starting from a non-Incel-related video. Overall, our findings paint an alarming picture of online radicalization: not only Incel activity is increasing over time, but platforms may also play an active role in steering users towards such extreme content.Acknowledgments: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under the Marie Sk\l{}dowska-Curie ENCASE project (GA No. 691025) and the CONCORDIA project (GA No. 830927), the US National Science Foundation (grants: 1942610, 2114407, 2114411, and 2046590), and the UK's National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online (UKRI grant: EP/V011189/1). This work reflects only the authors' views; the Agency and the Commission are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains