Radicalization within a network of misogynist extremists: a case study of an incel forum

Incels (involuntary celibates) are a group of people, linked to online misogyny and violent acts of terrorism, who mobilize around their inability to form romantic and/or sexual relationships. They have been shown to display signs of a violent extremist ideology. We conceptualize the ideology promoted by incels as misogynist and by bringing together different theories of gender and the gender order to formulate how the hetero-patriarchal and cisgenderist understanding of gender becomes an extremist worldview. We call this gender-based extremism misogynist extremism because misogyny is the most obviously violent structure of hetero-patriarchal gender order. Then, drawing on radicalization research and the social network analysis paradigm, we answer the research question: what are the communication patterns (network connections and actor attributes) that predict misogynist extremism among incels? We conduct our analysis on publicly visible posts from the forum incels.is, creating an undirected, unweighted network and then answering our research question using the auto-logistic actor attribute model to understand what individual attributes and network configurations predict user extremism. This study finds that extremists online form closed all-extremist communication triads. Consequently, they are significantly less likely to start new threads in the forum, suggesting that bonding social capital plays a more important role in an individual user’s extremism than bridging social capital.