2021/02/25 by Robin Mamié, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Mamié, Robin +3 · 6 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Gender Politics and Representation #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2102.12837
openalex publication_date 2021/02/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Researchers have suggested that "the Manosphere," a conglomerate of\nmen-centered online communities, may serve as a gateway to far right movements.\nIn that context, this paper quantitatively studies the migratory patterns\nbetween a variety of groups within the Manosphere and the Alt-right, a loosely\nconnected far right movement that has been particularly active in mainstream\nsocial networks. Our analysis leverages over 300 million comments spread\nthrough Reddit (in 115 subreddits) and YouTube (in 526 channels) to investigate\nwhether the audiences of channels and subreddits associated with these\ncommunities have converged between 2006 and 2018. In addition to subreddits\nrelated to the communities of interest, we also collect data on counterparts:\nother groups of users which we use for comparison (e.g., for YouTube we use a\nset of media channels). Besides measuring the similarity in the commenting user\nbases of these communities, we perform a migration study, calculating to which\nextent users in the Manosphere gradually engage with Alt-right content. Our\nresults suggest that there is a large overlap between the user bases of the\nAlt-right and of the Manosphere and that members of the Manosphere have a\nbigger chance to engage with far right content than carefully chosen\ncounterparts. However, our analysis also shows that migration and user base\noverlap varies substantially across different platforms and within the\nManosphere. Members of some communities (e.g., Men's Rights Activists)\ngradually engage with the Alt-right significantly more than counterparts on\nboth Reddit and YouTube, whereas for other communities, this engagement happens\nmostly on Reddit (e.g., Pick Up Artists). Overall, our work paints a nuanced\npicture of the pipeline between the Manosphere and the Alt-right, which may\ninform platforms' policies and moderation decisions regarding these\ncommunities.\n