The emergence and growth of incel subculture on the internet has triggered a considerable
body of research to date, most of which analysing its worldview or mapping its position and connections
within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the
incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a ...
The emergence and growth of incel subculture on the internet has triggered a considerable
body of research to date, most of which analysing its worldview or mapping its position and connections
within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the
incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is – like all
online subcultures and communities – a highly dynamic and multi-layered environment. Consequently,
we lack insufficiently nuanced answers to what is arguably the critical question for law enforcement and
academics alike: is this a violent extremist ideology? Using a uniquely extensive corpus covering a range
of online spaces constitutive of the incelosphere (forums, sub-Reddits, Instagram channels, blogs, wiki
pages) spanning several years, we analyse the evolution of incel language across both time and
platforms. Specifically, we test whether this language has grown more extreme over time as online
spaces shut down and others emerged. Our findings demonstrate that, while levels of violent extremist
language do vary across the incelosphere, they have steadily increased in the main online spaces over
the past 6 years. Further, we demonstrate that, while activity on these online spaces is responsive to
offline events such as major acts of incel-inspired violence and the COVID-19 lockdowns, the impact
of these on violent extremist ideation is not uniform.
