Divide and conquer : assessing thematic influence in men's activism on Reddit

Online forums are not simply echo chambers ; they are also spaces where ideas about masculinities (cisgender, transgender, straight, or queer) can be explored and debated. They offer sometimes unmoderated platforms to discuss the contemporary stakes regarding masculinities but also allow more radical views to influence the broader debate on gender and support anti-feminist standpoints. Our study dives into the networked dynamics of men's activism across four Reddit communities : r/MensRights, r/TheRedPill, r/MensLib, and r/PurplePillDebate. Reddit has been heavily scrutinized as a viral website for leaving moderation up to the administrators of each subreddit, giving way to the proliferation of hate speech. These four communities stretch across reactionary (r/MensRights, r/TheRedPill), progressive (r/MensLib) and undecided (r/PurplePillDebate) ideological leanings. We use a dataset composed of the entirety of the above-mentioned subreddits, which equates to over 500 000 posts and about 15 million comments, spanning from each subreddit’s inception through to 2022. Using a mixed-method approach of natural language processing, network analysis and qualitative investigation, we aim at identifying the potential patterns of thematic influence from the anti-feminist communities towards the more neutral and progressive ones. We find that each subreddit boasts its own distinctive set of topics confirming existing literature about the ideological positions of the communities. Our observation is that radical communities, i.e. r/TheRedPill and r/MensRights, rely on hybrid members (users who take part in multiple subreddits) to introduce new topics into more neutral/progressive spaces. For r/PurplePillDebate and r/MensLib, about 50% of all new topics discussed have been introduced by a cross-community participant. Hybrid members who disseminate new topics tend to hold central positions within their original networks of discussion, ranking among the 10% most influential users and the topics they introduce tend to become predominant in the progressive communities.