The male supremacist ecosystem has undergone significant changes in recent years. Manosphere terminology and rhetoric have increasingly permeated into the mainstream, finding their way into the digital content consumed by previously uninitiated users. Incels (involuntary celibates) have grown in reach and impact. Meanwhile, many pick-up artists (PUAs) have either disappeared or rebranded themselves as life coaches. This latter trend is largely attributable to the rise of influencer culture, which has enabled a new raft of neo-masculinist and male supremacist entrepreneurs to exploit male insecurities under the guise of ‘mental health’ and ‘motivation’, and to optimise the amplification potential of platforms such as YouTube Shorts and TikTok. Another significant development has been the co-option of anti-feminist women into these spaces in the form of ‘tradwife’ and far-right influencers. This paper reports on the qualitative findings of a study which tracked, recorded and coded the content recommended to 10 experimental or ‘sockpuppet’ accounts on 10 blank smartphones, 5 on YouTube Shorts and 5 on TikTok. By coding all content related to men’s rights, anti-feminism and neo-masculinist influencers, we were able to determine not only the frequency but also the nature of manosphere recommendations, based on different age profiles, interests and types of interaction. The research suggests a rapid and under-researched shift in the communicative practices of the manosphere, transitioning from more obscure platforms and meme cultures, into increasingly mainstream platforms and practices, promoting and monetising capitalist masculinities by leveraging the talking points of reactionary culture wars.

In this paper, we explore transnational discursive campaigns that use online popular culture to consolidate a “countercultural” vision of hard to extreme right politics. Hyperpartisan sites form a “mirror universe” or alternate news industry, counterposing their passionate partisanship against what they deem the fraudulent objectivity of mainstream media. In our preliminary study, we noted that “anti-woke” hashtags and memes were heavily freighted with transphobic images and messages and co-occurred with a range of other far-right content (with strong currents of anti-immigration, misogynist, “anti-system,” and conspiracy themes). Presented in mocking tones and mobilized by hyperpartisan sites, transphobic memes participate in consolidating far-right hegemony via online countercultural forms. In mapping the distribution patterns of this content, we observed 1) the extent to which a range of seemingly “independent” sites distribute the same content within a short period of times; 2) how “anti-woke” hashtags and memes served to consolidate a far-right worldview and package it as countercultural; 3) and finally, how transphobic content came to constitute something of a “federating” theme – an ideological entry point into or representative of a larger ensemble of sociopolitical arguments. In this sense, transphobia works as a federating meme, creating information cascades that promote alt-right ideologies. Information cascades describe patterns of online conformity (Lemieux 2003) on social media platforms like Twitter. By tracking a range of Quebecois right-wing influenceurs, we aim to ascertain the opportunistic mobilisation and reach of transphobic content in this Quebecois alternative influence network.

In 2020, the subreddit r/GenderCritical—one of the most active “gender critical” (GC) spaces on Reddit—was banned by the platform for promoting hateful, transphobic conduct. Following the closure of r/GenderCritical (and subsequent banning of dozens of high-profile, transphobic subreddits including r/ActualWomen, r/GenderCriticalSociety, and r/truelesbians), GC users—especially those in North America and Western Europe—migrated to more hidden, invite-only spaces. These included Discord servers as well as (much like alt-right alternative platforms Parler and Truth Social) platforms run by GCs themselves: Spinster.xyz, the short-lived Giggle app, subforums on Mumsnet, and Ovarit—an invite-only forum which imitates Reddit’s architecture launched by former moderators of r/GenderCritical. While we might celebrate the closure of openly hateful communities on major social platforms, a crucial side-effect of the GC dispersal is that their activity has become (following patterns in reactionary political movements online more broadly) increasingly shrouded and insular. In this project, we provide an overview of the current landscape of GC activity on social media as it exists in the post-r/GenderCritical era. We describe how users are “peaked” (the GC equivalent of “redpilled”) and pipelined from algorithmic media platforms into insular and extremist spaces such as Ovarit, Mumsnet, and Discord. We then examine discourse within two popular GC forums, Ovarit and Mumsnet (specifically: Mumsnet’s “Feminism: Sex & gender” board), to identify how these groups circulate disinformation, perform political mythmaking, and construct and reinscribe reactionary identities in the context of GC ideology and extremism.

At this moment, as online platforms are overrun with bots, AI content, and declining user bases, media scholars ask what will happen after the platformatized internet transforms into something else. As we look to the many different possible futures, we must also ask: what will happen to the nearly two decades of information on these sites as their userbases migrate to platform alternatives and the original platforms are no longer viable? What will happen to the records from the most vulnerable users, those historically marginalized and erased from traditional archiving efforts, such as queer and trans individuals? In this paper, we call for specific attention to be paid to the unique characteristics and limitations of digital archiving efforts, especially as it pertains to queer and trans folks. To do so, we consider and introduce the concept of hostile digital archives to articulate the possible futures of web history.

To propose an alternative to traditional archival methodologies, we draw from scholarship in web histories, critical archive studies, and speculative design considerations for hostile, negative, and adversarial design that meaningfully imagine alternatives to current limitations in digital recordkeeping practices. To do so, we introduce the hostile digital archive, and provide three case studies for analysis, each of which explores a different aspect of hostility in digital archiving. We define a hostile digital archive as one that calls attention to the dynamic nature of born-digital objects through its format or content, and, in so doing, subverts traditional understandings of archives as neutral sites of static preservation.