Beyond Fish and Bicycles: Exploring the Varieties of Online Women's Ideological Spaces

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 6 million Reddit comments to categorize and understand the diversity of online women's ideological spaces, revealing meaningful differences and migration patterns of toxic communities post-ban.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, data-driven taxonomy of online women's ideological spaces and examines community migration after platform bans.

Findings

Identified diverse ideological categories among online women's spaces.

Found significant topic and community differences.

Documented migration of toxic communities to alternative platforms.

Abstract

The Internet has been instrumental in connecting under-represented and vulnerable groups of people. Platforms built to foster social interaction and engagement have enabled historically disenfranchised groups to have a voice. One such vulnerable group is women. In this paper, we explore the diversity in online women's ideological spaces using a multi-dimensional approach. We perform a large-scale, data-driven analysis of over 6M Reddit comments and submissions from 14 subreddits. We elicit a diverse taxonomy of online women's ideological spaces, ranging from counterparts to the so-called Manosphere to Gender-Critical Feminism. We then perform content analysis, finding meaningful differences across topics and communities. Finally, we shed light on two platforms, ovarit.com and thepinkpill.co, where two toxic communities of online women's ideological spaces (Gender-Critical Feminism and Femcels) migrated after their ban on Reddit.