Red Flags and Cherry Picking: Reading The Scientific Blackpill Wiki

TL;DR

This paper examines how the Scientific Blackpill wiki, used by incels, cites scientific research to support their ideology, often distorting or overgeneralizing findings to justify misogynistic beliefs.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the scientific accuracy and misuse in the Blackpill wiki, highlighting patterns of motivated reasoning and misinformation.

Findings

The wiki largely cites legitimate science but distorts it to fit incel beliefs.

Overgeneralization and lack of context are common in the cited research.

The study discusses implications for online radicalization and misinformation.

Abstract

Incels are an online community of men who share a belief in extreme misogyny, the glorification of violence, and biological essentialism. They refer to their core ideology as "The Blackpill", a belief that physical attraction is the only path to romantic success and that women are only attracted to one very specific, hypermasculine archetype. This is not only a belief system; incels believe their ideology grounded in hard science. The research that incels use as evidence of their belief system is collected in an extensive online document, the Scientific Blackpill wiki page. In this research, we analyze the claims made on the wiki against the research cited to assess how the wiki authors are using or misusing science in support of their ideology. We find that the page largely cites legitimate science and describes it partly or mostly accurately. However, in discussing it, the results are often overgeneralized, stripped of context, or otherwise distorted to support the preexisting incel viewpoint. This echoes previous findings about motivated reasoning and borrowing scientific legitimacy in other misinformation and conspiracy-minded ideologies. We discuss the implications this has for understanding online radicalization and information quality.