Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube
Robin Mami\'e, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Robert West

TL;DR
This study analyzes how communities within the Manosphere on Reddit and YouTube serve as gateways to the Alt-right, revealing significant overlaps and migration patterns that vary across platforms and communities.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of user migration and community overlap between the Manosphere and the Alt-right on social media.
Findings
Large overlap between Alt-right and Manosphere user bases.
Members of some communities are more likely to engage with far right content.
Migration patterns differ across platforms and communities.
Abstract
Researchers have suggested that "the Manosphere," a conglomerate of men-centered online communities, may serve as a gateway to far right movements. In that context, this paper quantitatively studies the migratory patterns between a variety of groups within the Manosphere and the Alt-right, a loosely connected far right movement that has been particularly active in mainstream social networks. Our analysis leverages over 300 million comments spread through Reddit (in 115 subreddits) and YouTube (in 526 channels) to investigate whether the audiences of channels and subreddits associated with these communities have converged between 2006 and 2018. In addition to subreddits related to the communities of interest, we also collect data on counterparts: other groups of users which we use for comparison (e.g., for YouTube we use a set of media channels). Besides measuring the similarity in the…
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