Understanding the Incel Community on YouTube
Date Issued
January 22, 2020
Abstract
YouTube is by far the largest host of user-generated video content worldwide.
Alas, the platform also hosts inappropriate, toxic, and/or hateful content. One
community that has come into the spotlight for sharing and publishing hateful
content are the so-called Involuntary Celibates (Incels), a loosely defined
movement ostensibly focusing on men's issues, who have often been linked to
misogynistic views. In this paper, we set out to analyze the Incel community on
YouTube. We collect videos shared on Incel-related communities within Reddit,
and perform a data-driven characterization of the content posted on YouTube
along several axes. Among other things, we find that the Incel community on
YouTube is growing rapidly, that they post a substantial number of negative
comments, and that they discuss a broad range of topics ranging from ideology,
e.g., around the Men Going Their Own Way movement, to discussions filled with
racism and/or misogyny. Finally, we quantify the probability that a user will
encounter an Incel-related video by virtue of YouTube's recommendation
algorithm. Within five hops when starting from a non-Incel-related video, this
probability is 1 in 5, which is alarmingly high given the toxicity of said
content.
Alas, the platform also hosts inappropriate, toxic, and/or hateful content. One
community that has come into the spotlight for sharing and publishing hateful
content are the so-called Involuntary Celibates (Incels), a loosely defined
movement ostensibly focusing on men's issues, who have often been linked to
misogynistic views. In this paper, we set out to analyze the Incel community on
YouTube. We collect videos shared on Incel-related communities within Reddit,
and perform a data-driven characterization of the content posted on YouTube
along several axes. Among other things, we find that the Incel community on
YouTube is growing rapidly, that they post a substantial number of negative
comments, and that they discuss a broad range of topics ranging from ideology,
e.g., around the Men Going Their Own Way movement, to discussions filled with
racism and/or misogyny. Finally, we quantify the probability that a user will
encounter an Incel-related video by virtue of YouTube's recommendation
algorithm. Within five hops when starting from a non-Incel-related video, this
probability is 1 in 5, which is alarmingly high given the toxicity of said
content.
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