Becoming Radicalized: The Evolution of Hateful Rhetoric in the Men’s Rights Movement

Social media platforms have played a significant role in the expansion of radical communities. However, little research has analyzed the evolution of hateful ideology. This study analyzes over 13 million submissions to Reddit, comparing the content posted by users active in the Men’s Rights community to a matched random sample of Reddit users. We build an extensive history of each user’s submissions to determine whether increased engagement in the Men’s Rights community leads to an increase in hateful rhetoric. Our findings point to a monotonic increase in the submission of hateful, divisive rhetoric as users become more engaged in /r/MensRights. Register at the following link: https://tulane.libcal.com/calendar/events/LDW_talk

Bios:

Patrick Rafail is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. His research interests focus on social movements, policing, and computational social science. His recent book The Rise, Fall, and Influence of the Tea Party Insurgency (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2023. He is currently working on projects analyzing fatal police shootings in the United States and the Men’s Rights Movement.

Whitney E. O’Connell is an active duty Air Force Lieutenant Colonel (s) and a PhD student in Tulane University’s interdisciplinary City, Culture, and Community program, with a disciplinary focus in sociology. Her research interests include social movements, culture, emotion, morality, and computational social science. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the production of culture in an online social movement using the Men’s Rights Movement as a case study.