Paper Info
Title
"How over is it?" Understanding the Incel Community on YouTube.
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3479556
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Internet privacy,Radicalization,Publishing,Set (psychology),Sociology
Conference
5
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
CSCW2
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kostantinos Papadamou122.72
Savvas Zannettou25913.57
Jeremy Blackburn341541.72
Emiliano De Cristofaro4116177.02
Gianluca Stringhini570161.87
Michael Sirivianos669641.25