The Men’s Rights Movement and Online Anti-feminist Echo Chambers

• In Event: 3570 - Gender, Social Movements, and (In)Justice

Abstract

The Men’s Rights movements has grown extensively for the last four decades. New media platforms, and especially online communities, have been instrumental in the rise of the movement, and the alt-right more generally. Despite this, there are few studies directly examining how the Men’s Rights movement makes use of online technologies on social media platforms. To fill this gap, we analyze 70,580 posts contributed to /r/MensRights, a large community of Men’s Rights activists on Reddit, using latent Dirichlet allocation and negative binomial regression models. Our results indicate that /r/MensRights serves as an online echo chamber for the Men’s Rights movement, allowing participants to make demonstrably false claims, which rapidly become axiomatic. We conclude that online spaces such as /r/MensRights provide an optimal combination of self-reinforcing community norms and anonymity, providing the Men’s Rights movement with powerful tools to expand their reach, recruit new members, and expand its political power. We argue that similar dynamics apply to the more recent surge of rightist activism.

Authors

• Patrick Rafail, Tulane University

• Isaac R. Freitas, Tulane University