Exploring Incel Language and Subreddit Activity on Reddit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incels, or involuntary celibates, are individuals who struggle socially, due to their inability to have a romantic or sexual relationships. In popular culture, the community is known for churning out memes, strange made-up words, and startling acts of violence. Behind the veil of humor and "relatable content" lies an anti-feminist ideology that channels Incel loneliness into intense resentment towards themselves, women, and society at large. At its most extreme, Inceldom has motivated attacks like the 2014 Isla Vista attack and the 2018 Toronto van attack, resulting in the deaths of six and ten, respectively. To investigate the overall activity of this community, we look at the timeseries of comment activity on three popular Incel forums on Reddit. We then compare the words commented from one of these forums, r/Braincels, to a random Reddit comment corpus using rank divergence. The timeseries of the words that appear more often in r/Braincels indicates that these words may be a fingerprint for Incel communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".