"How over is it?" Understanding the Incel Community on YouTube

Papadamou, Kostantinos; Zannettou, Savvas; Blackburn, Jeremy; Cristofaro, Emiliano De; Stringhini, Gianluca; Sirivianos, Michael

doi:10.1145/3479556

Cited by 44 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Our audit joins prior work [21,22,23,24] that uncovers ideological bias in YouTube's recommendation systems. Our large-scale experiments find that recommendations that users receive are aligned with their ideology, and this is especially true for right-leaning users, who are recommended an increasing number of ideologically congenial videos, also especially among the political right, and moreover that the recommendations are progressively more extreme, leading to the claimed rabbit holes [20].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…As we discuss below, trained sock puppets achieve a middle ground between untrained sock puppets and real users for auditing purposes because (i) they trigger the feedback loop effect that real users (but not untrained sock puppets) experience and (ii) the observed radicalization can be attributed solely to YouTube's recommendations (which is not possible for studies of real users). In fact, recent work has adjusted this framework of trained sock puppets to audit misinformation in YouTube's recommendation system [21,22,23,24,58]. We extend this work to the broader consequential domain of ideologically biased recommendations.…”

Section: Auditing Youtube's Recommendation Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2020, a federal court ruled that the violation of a website's TOS is not grounds for being held criminally liable under the CFAA [110]. This landmark decision provides legitimacy to sock puppet based auditing of algorithmic systems, which is now considered a well-established methodology in the academic research community [23,24,25] In terms of legality of the intervention by users, YouTube does not allow users to fraudulently engage with its service in any manner. As our intervention introduces external, non-recommended videos in a user's watch history, it can be construed as fraudulent behavior on part of the user in how they interact with the service.…”

Section: Legal Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidence as to whether YouTube's algorithm disproportionately recommends ideologically biased content is inconclusive. Whereas some studies report that the algorithm tends to recommend radical, divisive, or conspiratorial content [21,22,23,24], others provide evidence to the contrary [25,26]. These conflicting conclusions are due to subtle but crucial differences in the methodologies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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YouTube, The Great Radicalizer? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations

Haroon¹,

Chhabra²,

Liu³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Recommendations algorithms of social media platforms are often criticized for placing users in "rabbit holes" of (increasingly) ideologically biased content. Despite these concerns, prior evidence on this algorithmic radicalization is inconsistent. Furthermore, prior work lacks systematic interventions that reduce the potential ideological bias in recommendation algorithms. We conduct a systematic audit of YouTube's recommendation system using a hundred thousand sock puppets to determine the presence of ideological bias (i.e., are recommendations aligned with users' ideology), its magnitude (i.e., are users recommended an increasing number of videos aligned with their ideology), and radicalization (i.e., are the recommendations progressively more extreme). Furthermore, we design and evaluate a bottomup intervention to minimize ideological bias in recommendations without relying on cooperation from YouTube. We find that YouTube's recommendations do direct users -especially right-leaning users -to ideologically biased and increasingly radical content on both homepages and in up-next recommendations. Our intervention effectively mitigates the observed bias, leading to more recommendations to ideologically neutral, diverse, and dissimilar content, yet debiasing is especially challenging for right-leaning users. Our systematic assessment shows that while YouTube recommendations lead to ideological bias, such bias can be mitigated through our intervention. * Additional information, including the accompanying source code and data, is available at: https://github.com/ucdavis-noyce/YouTube-Auditing-Mitigating-Bias 1 Naturally, most citizens do not inhabit insular communities online [7,8]. The small set that does, however, is socially consequential. Those users tend to be more partisan, more politically active, and have a disproportionate influence on the democratic process [9,10]

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Auditing Youtube's Recommendation Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Legal Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

YouTube, The Great Radicalizer? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations

Haroon¹,

Chhabra²,

Liu³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Papadamou et al. (2021) found evidence of an echo chamber effect in the incel community on YouTube, with the algorithm pushing additional incel content on users who interact with an initial incel‐related video. Echo chambers can move the members of an entire group to take up more extreme views over time (Sunstein, 2002).…”

Section: Discussion: Incels As Terroristsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“This is a political movement, friend”: Why “incels” support violence

O'Donnell

Shor

2022

British Journal of Sociology

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How do members of extremist groups think about violence conducted by individual members on the group's behalf? We examine the link between extremism‐motivated violence and extremist groups through a case study of misogynist incels, a primarily online community of men who lament their lack of sexual success with women. To learn how misogynist incels talk about mass violence committed by members of their group, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of 3,658 comments relating to the 2018 Toronto van attack, in which self‐declared incel Alek Minassian drove a van into pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16. We find overwhelming support among self‐proclaimed incels for the attack and violence more generally. Incels viewed mass violence as instrumental, serving the following four main purposes: garnering increased attention, exacting revenge, reinforcing masculinity, and generating political change. Our findings indicate the need to examine misogynist incels as a potential terrorist group and male supremacism as a basis for terrorism.

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Digital Culture, Online Misogyny, and Gender‐based Violence

Ging

2023

The Handbook of Gender, Communication, and Women%27s Human Rights

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"How over is it?" Understanding the Incel Community on YouTube

Cited by 44 publications

References 42 publications

YouTube, The Great Radicalizer? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations

YouTube, The Great Radicalizer? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations

“This is a political movement, friend”: Why “incels” support violence

Digital Culture, Online Misogyny, and Gender‐based Violence

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