“I found these places to be toxic”: A mixed methods content analysis of visitors’ impressions of incel forums
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The forums of involuntary celibates (incels) are easily accessible and increasingly receiving attention from media, scholars, and non-incels, mostly for their troubling content against women. This study aimed to (a) qualitatively describe the different impressions of visitors and (b) quantitively examine the sociodemographic characteristics associated with the prevalence of each category of impressions. The sample comprised 390 adults (43% women; 2.56% self-identified incels; M age = 26.86) who have visited incel forums at least once. They completed an online questionnaire on sexual inexperience in adulthood and described their impressions of incel forums in an open-ended question. An inductive content analysis revealed that impressions of incel forums were positioned on a continuum ranging from threat (39.53%) to shelter (11.90%) with four intermediate categories: incel forums as testimonies of dysfunctional thoughts (20.04%), incel forums perceived as odd (11.02%), ambivalent impressions (3.45%), and incel forums as gatherings of individuals with difficulties (14.14%). Chi-square analyses revealed that, among participants who perceive incel forums as a threat, women, other genders individuals, and non-incels were overrepresented compared to men and incels, who were more likely to perceive incel forums as a shelter. t-test analyses revealed that participants who perceived incel forums as a shelter were older at first sexual intercourse. These results suggest that incel forums are not perceived as dangerous by all outsiders and that those who have more positive impressions (i.e., men, late sexual starters) are those most likely to relate to them. The implications for future research and professional practice are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".