On March 15, 2019, a far-right gunman entered the Al Noor Mosque during Friday afternoon prayers and began a shooting spree, killing 51 people. It was later discovered that the shooter had been influenced by extremist ideas he found on YouTube. For example, he donated money to self-described philosopher Stefan Molyneux, who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a cult leader spreading white supremacist ideas to millions of YouTube users. The spread of far-right conspiracy theories, such as the Great Replacement, resulted in Molyneux's removal from YouTube in 2020.

Our study utilizes a unique historical dataset to explore the radicalization of Molyneux’s YouTube community from 2008 to 2018. Adopting the lens of "reactionary fandoms," we use a digital hermeneutics method with the computational toolkit 4CAT to study engagement, alternating between a macro and micro perspective. On the macro, we map general engagement patterns, such as the most commented videos and most discussed topics from 2008 to 2018. On the micro, we use an open coding method to analyze the comment history of six highly engaged, long-term audiences (6 years) to understand the core community.

Contributing to the increasing research on the influence of YouTube’s comment section on processes of radicalization, our study explores how Molyneux’s audience used the comments section to co-construct a community that values "logic," "facts," and "truth" to justify their race realist beliefs. Our research thus adds an essential historical perspective to the development of the "deep stories" that radical communities use to build their worldview.

The various communities of the manosphere and, in particular, the incel subculture position themselves as responses to the perceived excesses of the feminist and sexual revolutions. The spread of digital men’s rights rhetoric has been heavily dependent on memes, symbolism and the use of visual motifs such as the Red Pill. This is especially true of the incel community, whose imageries perform multiple ideological, cultural and affective functions that are often highly context-dependent and require complex subcultural knowledge. However, despite the central role played by memes and other images in propagating the incel worldview, most scholarship on the community is language-based. Moreover, research into the visual cultures of extremist groups online is relatively new, and most of it is focused on the far-right or on factions of Salafi-jihadism. This paper reports on the findings of the first and largest systematic analysis to date of incel memes and avatars across seven major incel platforms. The study used a combination of codebook-guided quantitative analysis on a dataset of 3,500 memes and 1,000 avatars, as well as closer qualitative analysis of representative images from each platform. This methodological approach seeks to bridge the gap between large-scale machine classification, which is necessarily crude and lacking in contextual cultural knowledge, with purely qualitative methods, which tell us little about broader trends and patterns in the communities analysed. Our findings indicate that such large-scale, visual analysis yields significant new knowledge about the communicative, rhetorical and ideological characteristics and functioning of the incel subculture across different platforms.

While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a “revolution” in how social movements communicate and organize, digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a “revolution” in how we study movements or their histories. My paper enters this discussion by suggesting a "small data" approach for studying the early digital presence of the men’s rights movement, and its transition from print to digital media. I compare two unique data sets involving print and digital archives to map out the geographical locations of men's rights groups and adherents in the early 1990s. I demonstrate how: 1) there is significant overlap between the print organizations and early digital spaces for men's rights activists; and 2) men’s rights communities in North America were often concentrated in areas like Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the North Eastern Seaboard. Ultimately, I argue that print materials, “small data,” and non-computational methods are still valuable tools to study social movements and their early digital histories.

Recent research on the new formation in US politics of the red-pilled right has noted the movement's strategic creation of alternative digital ecosystems (referred to as Alt-Tech) through building parallel internet infrastructures. Current explanations of this structure’s rise, while useful, are overly narrow in their focus on platforms and their structural frames. In order to address these limitations and better understand the foundations of the Alt-Tech landscape, this work conducts a critical discourse analysis on a red-pilled institution that’s risen to prominence in recent years: the domain registrar Epik. Specifically, this paper analyzes a corpus of 178 blog posts created by Epik since the company’s founding in 2009 through January 2021. From this, three discursive patterns are identified: digital liberty, domain name as asset, and digital sovereignty. This study argues that these discourses emerge out of and are united through the symbolic relationships established by one section of the red-pilled coalition in particular: right-wing libertarianism. Additionally, both the threats to the red-pilled right and the solution of a parallel internet infrastructure are shown to be constructed through the use of these overlapping discursive frames. This conclusion indicates the importance of the conservative libertarian ideology to the development and success of the Alt-Tech ecosystem. It also suggests a synergy between this movement strategy and the commercial internet in particular, as the libertarian frames identified in Epik’s blog are commonly found in the utopian discourse that was infused in early visions of the technology.