Incel Activity on Social Media Linked to Local Mating Ecology

Young men with few prospects of attracting a mate have historically threatened the internal peace and stability of societies. In some contemporary societies, such involuntary celibate—or incel—men promote much online misogyny and perpetrate real-world violence. We tested the prediction that online incel activity arises via local real-world mating-market forces that affect relationship formation. From a database of 4 billion Twitter posts (2012–2018), we geolocated 321 million tweets to 582 commuting zones in the continental United States, of which 3,649 tweets used words peculiar to incels and 3,745 were about incels. We show that such tweets arise disproportionately within places where mating competition among men is likely to be high because of male-biased sex ratios, few single women, high income inequality, and small gender gaps in income. Our results suggest a role for social media in monitoring and mitigating factors that lead young men toward antisocial behavior in real-world societies.

‘Who unlocked the kitchen?’: Online misogyny, YouTube comments and women's professional street skateboarding

Abuse and harassment of sportswomen has become a global issue. And while the sportification of skateboarding has increased professional opportunities and media visibility for women athletes, it has also resulted in misogyny and gendered abuse on online platforms where competition coverage is posted. This study examines comments that collectively target competitors in YouTube streams of major professional women’s street skating competitions. Examined through the lens of ‘virtual manhood acts’, it demonstrates how gender boundaries of skateboarding are policed online through masculine acts such as gendered language, comparison, sexualisation and stigmatisation of non-normative femininities. In undertaking these virtual manhood acts, perpetrators delegitimise women skaters collectively and engage in strategies that elevate male membership in both the sport and fandom. The pervasive presence of abuse and misogyny highlights a need for further sport-specific research into behaviours which may impact athletes’ emotional and mental well-being, and create further barriers to participation, particularly in male-dominated sports cultures.

All Women Belong in the Kitchen, and Other Dangerous Tropes: Online Misogyny as a National Security Threat

Online misogyny is an under-studied form of information warfare. Often dismissed as “boys will be boys,” online misogyny has been allowed to percolate and create communities that have far-reaching impacts. The impacts of online misogyny are not confined to the internet. In this article, the authors show how the ubiquitous nature of online misogyny poses a national security threat. We explore three diverse case studies: the United States military, the incel movement, and ISIS to demonstrate the far-reaching nature of the security threat. Though the nature of the security threats is different, the intervening cause—unchecked online misogyny—is the same.

Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

“How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”

On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter (Dhrodia 2018), identifying the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry. Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the “Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition (Pihlaja 2014), and, therefore, merits investigation. By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond.