From Words to Actions: A Comprehensive Approach to Identifying Incel Behavior on Reddit

The incel (involuntary celibate) community is a radicalized online subculture. Understanding its dynamics is crucial for mitigating youth radicalization and preventing online polarization. In this study, we examine Reddit communities to identify users at risk of deep engagement in incel-related subreddits. We analyze activity patterns and comments of 14,000 users and employ a two-step approach to carefully prepare a custom set of features to identify at-risk users. We first consider 7,000 incel-engaged users and use them to select 7,000 control users who are similar to the incel-engaged users in terms of non-incel activities. Recent subreddit activity patterns of those users are used to create features. We then use word2vec on the comment texts to create text-based features. We find that utilizing only the subreddit activity patterns of users achieves an accuracy of 79% while using word2vec modeling alone yields a classification accuracy of 76%. Remarkably, the two approaches have complementary strengths and integrating both approaches achieves a near-perfect classification accuracy of 99.8%. By employing a two-pronged approach, our results achieve a significant increase over previous work. By illuminating social media’s role in online radicalization processes, we hope that the insights from our work can guide policymakers and platform moderators in creating safer online spaces.