That big report on incels that came out last week doesn’t live up to the hype

It’s not that complicated. If you want to learn what’s going on in the heads of the regular contributors to the incels.is forum, one of the best (and quickest) ways is to simply read an assortment of comments posted there (or perhaps several of my posts on the subject, all of which quote copiously from the original incel comments).

Hell, you can learn a lot just by scrolling through the discussion topics on incels.is. Here are a few of the topics being discussed today:

The true reason why women don’t have a personality (only men do)

having dark skinned male children is child abuse

I recorded myself playing the “White Girls Fuck Dogs” song out loud to a group of white girls walking

We all curries deserve white blonde foids as a reparation for European colonisation in subcontinent.

Incels are the most oppressed people in the world

The pissbottles I have

I’m mayo. Where is my noodlewhore? My curryfoid?

Saw a n*gger with a Becky 2day

What would push you to go full ER (in GTA)?

Anyone Else Fuck Their Pillow?

Aside from the post about murdering people, they’re actually fairly toned down today, undoubtedly on their best behavior because all the publicity they’ve gotten lately is likely to drive “normies” to check out the site. I suspect some posts about rape and/or underage girls have been deleted by the mods as well; those are both usually quite popular topics. That said, most of what they’re talking about is still fairly horrific stuff seemingly designed to make other incels even more bitter and depressed and alienated from the world.

In its report issued last week the Center for Countering Digital Hate employed a weird and cumbersome methodology that in the end tells us much less than simply immersing ourselves in incel writings does: they adopted a quantitative approach, “scraping” something like a million pages off the incels.is site so they could, among other things, count the number of times incels used specific slurs, including the weird ones they’ve made up. No, really.

Well, those are racial and ethnic slurs. In case you’re wondering what slurs they use for women, here you go.

While it is, well, informative to note that incels call women such lovely names as “hole,” “toilet,” and “roastie,” the latter because “sluts” are supposed to have vaginas that are so used up they look like roast beef, does it matter than they used “toilet” 379 times during the time period covered by the report, just edging out the old reliable “cunt” by one instance? No, not really; it doesn’t add much to our understanding that a simple list of slurs might have provided. What matters more is how these words are used, which you can’t learn without, well, actually reading some posts.

Sometimes it is useful to add stuff up. The report documents just how popular incels.is has become.

This dataset reveals that the incel forum consists of a small number of active members with interest from a much larger number of visiting users:
• 2.6 million visits a month, making a 16:1 ratio of visits to posts
• 17,118 total members
• 4,057 active members who posted in the period of study
• 406 ‘powerusers’ who account for 74.6% of all posts on the forum

The top ten most prolific posters on the site spent roughly eight hours a day there, the equivalent of working a full time job.

Another of the report’s “findings” was that a plurality of posts on incels.is deal with distressing stuff, putting the lie to those who argue that forums like this one can function as “support groups” for lonely men; in fact, they provide the opposite of support.

Analysis of the ‘tags’ applied to discussion threads on the forum shows that over a third are tagged with topics promoting expressions of anger or despair over members’ incel status. Just 5.8% are tagged with topics promoting a more optimistic outlook.

The report also documented that incels.is discuss rape and pedophilia/ephebophilia a lot, with most commenters agreeing that both are good things. But this isn’t news.

One thing that a quantitative approach can be said to do better than a strictly qualitative one is to track trends. One chilling trend: “Posts mentioning incel mass murders increased 59% between 2021 and 2022.”

While this is clearly not good news, it’s not clear exactly what it means. Does this mean that incels are 59% more likely to commit mass murder than they were a year ago? Well, no; the real-world implications of this trend are essentially unknown.

One non-quantitative finding of the report, unless counting to three makes it quantitative: three underage incels are posting some alarming stuff to the forum.

Researchers identified three users aged between 15 and 17 who were amongst the forum’s most active members and expressed extreme views.
• Adam: 17, logged on for 10 hours a day, posted about “Jewish propaganda”
• Ben: 15, discussed desire to commit a mass shooting in posts
• Carl: student, discussed evading referral to UK’s anti-extremism program

How the fuck does a 15-year-old even qualify as an “incel” anyway? The average age boys lose their virginity at is close to 17. I don’t know his logic here but he seems quite angry about it.

I don’t want to dismiss the report altogether; there are certainly some interesting results in it. And it more or less confirms that incels are raging misogynists, self-hating pessimists and outright bigots not only towards women but towards various racial and ethnic groups other than white people. Oh, and that quite a few of them spend a lot of time thinking about committing mass murder. It’s useful to have some numbers to attach to these generalizations, even if it’s not always clear just what these numbers mean in the real world.

NOTE: While most of the press coverage of this report has been relatively uncritical, the, er, highly controversial journalist Jesse Singal, perhaps best known for his backward and deeply flawed writings on trans issues, thinks even less of this study than I do. But his “takedown” of the study is filled with bizarrely naive notions about incels. I will be writing about it, probably tomorrow.

Follow me on Mastodon.

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.