The Men’s Rights movements have grown extensively in the last four decades. Social media platforms, especially online communities, have been instrumental in the rise of the movement. Despite this, few studies have directly examined how the Men’s Rights movement frames its grievance in online spaces or analyzed community reactions to user-contributed content. To fill these gaps, we analyze 70,580 posts contributed to /r/MensRights, a large community of Men’s Rights activists on Reddit, using a combination of topic models and negative binomial regression. Our results indicate that users active on /r/MensRights have developed a core set of grievances. Due to the mechanics of Reddit, where users can upvote posts to increase their visibility, contributed content that is consistent with community norms is prominently featured. Online spaces such as /r/MensRights provide an optimal combination of self-reinforcing community norms and anonymity, providing social movements with powerful tools to expand their reach, recruit new members, and expand its political power. We argue that these dynamics apply more generally to social movement mobilization that occurs online.

Civic engagement and protest mobilization have generally been treated as distinct activities, with separate literatures examining each form of participation. This differentiation largely rests on the political nature of protest, which is treated as inconsistent with more apolitical civic engagement. We argue that the boundaries between protest participation and civic engagement became more permeable over time. We link this to consistency in the profiles of individuals who become engaged and the institutionalization of protest, which expanded the participatory base of protest to new groups. Using four waves of the European and World Values Survey, we analyze 78,524 individuals from 20 member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Results from a multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrate that while there have been modest increases in protesting and civic engagement over time, individuals participating in both types of activities have experienced the most growth, consistent with our argument.