Content area

Abstract

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.

Details

1009240
Title
Radicalization within a network of misogynist extremists: a case study of an incel forum
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
852
Publication year
2025
Publication date
Dec 2025
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
Place of publication
London
Country of publication
Netherlands
e-ISSN
2662-9992
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2025-06-18
Milestone dates
2025-05-29 (Registration); 2024-07-09 (Received); 2025-05-29 (Accepted)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
18 Jun 2025
ProQuest document ID
3222151813
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/radicalization-within-network-misogynist/docview/3222151813/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Copyright Palgrave Macmillan Dec 2025
Last updated
2025-11-07
Database
2 databases
  • Coronavirus Research Database
  • ProQuest One Academic