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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

In 1993, a largely forgotten neo-Nazi named Milton Kleim Jr. launched (what was yet to be called a website titled) “Aryan News Network” with the proto-internet platform USENET. Building upon more than a decade of revolutionary new communications technologies—embraced early and often by right-wing extremists—this peer-to-peer tool was intended as a form of ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the ‘main–stream media.’

Involuntary celibates (incels) are individuals who feel alienated from society because of their perceived inability to attract women. They share a narrative which valorises violence as a means to restructure society according to misogynistic ideals. Since promoting a radical misogynistic ideology through violence is legally prohibited and socially unacceptable, it is necessary for incels to hide out online where virtual mediums promise anonymity. Virtual relationality (VR) allowed unorganised individuals with a shared grievance against mainstream societal values to develop into a secretive collective. VR means that individuals connect in chatrooms and internet forums where they exchange interpretations of a narrative which presents their social situation as oppressive and dehumanising. They blame ‘modernist’ values and social practices for their ills and share perspectives of how they should interact with the world. These perspectives frequently justify or condone acts of physical violence. Relating in the virtual world gave these individuals’ shared grievances a sense of coherence and allowed for an amplification of the influence of their violent acts by affirming the value of extremist ideas. VR turned individuals without consistent preferences and a unifying organisational medium into a ‘hydra’ with a felt global presence. The virtual nature of incels complicates responses by 1) enabling the collective to have global reach, 2) allowing it to function without an organised body or institutional structures, 3) making it difficult to identify individual incels, and 4) making it difficult to tell when incels pose a genuine security threat. These realities make it crucial to develop a fuller understanding of how the incel collective functions online.

Academic literature widely assumes that extremist-housing online forums, like 4chan, uniformly celebrate acts of right-wing terrorism (e.g. via “sainthood memes”), such as those committed by Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant. Aside from a handful of exceptions, this body of research typically fails to acknowledge that ideologically likeminded individuals on 4chan also regularly debate the merits of both terrorists and their violent attacks. Our topic modeling of 100 thousand posts on 4chan’s infamous /pol/ board shows—heated—debates over Breivik and Tarrant ranging from celebratory, to condemning, and moral to conspiratorial. We argue that overlooking these debates limits valuable theoretical and practical insights.