Examining membership across multiple online communities in the “manosphere”

Online communities are vast, complex spaces attracting diverse users, offering support and connection, but also spreading harmful content, including misogyny and extremism. Current research on online communities explores user roles and community structures within single communities. We extend this by examining engagement across multiple communities using over 4 million Reddit posts from 20 “subreddits” in the “manosphere”—an interconnected ecosystem of anti-feminist online communities. In summary, (1) users’ membership in the “manosphere” constitutes engagement with an array of communities, (2) we develop a measure of relative engagement (MRE) to show that users post unequally across their member communities, and (3) we explore the patterns of engagement across communities in the manosphere. We discuss how users navigate multiplicitous identity expressions across communities in the “manosphere” (as measured by MRE) and highlight the value of studying online community membership from a more holistic perspective for researchers, designers, and content moderators.