Incel forum users arrive angry—and their language gets more extreme over time

A study of prolific users on incel forums found that these individuals express more anger in their comments than users on other comparable social media platforms. However, they did not express greater sadness. The researchers also found that many users were already using incel-specific vocabulary when they joined the forum, suggesting that their exposure to incel ideology likely occurred elsewhere on the internet. The study was published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” are members of an online subculture who describe themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite wanting one. They refer to this condition as “inceldom.” This community is predominantly made up of men who express frustration and resentment toward those who are sexually active, particularly women and more sexually successful men.

Members of this group often describe feeling lonely and rejected. Conversations within incel communities tend to center on perceived personal unattractiveness, social disadvantages, and the belief that they will never find a romantic partner. Some incels attribute their difficulties to societal standards and gender norms, which they believe unfairly favor physically and socially attractive individuals.

The subculture has been associated with misogyny, with some incels promoting socially conservative ideas in which men control partner selection. The group has gained public attention in recent years due to violent acts committed by individuals identifying as incels or endorsing similar ideologies.

Study author Melissa S. de Roos and her colleagues set out to examine how prolonged interaction on an incel forum affects users’ language, particularly regarding expressions of anger, sadness, and violent extremist language. They hypothesized that the longer users participated in the forum, the more likely their language would reflect increased anger, sadness, and extremist sentiment.

To investigate this, the researchers collected data from the public section of one of the most active incel forums, https://www.incels.is. Using two Python libraries (BeautifulSoup and Requests), they scraped 100 pages of forum posts, each containing 100 posts, on the last day of March 2022.

They focused on comments made between January and March 2022, totaling 135,728 posts. From this dataset, they isolated comments made by users who had posted at least 100 times during the period. These 166 individuals were classified as prolific users. The researchers then analyzed their comments for expressions of sadness, anger, and violent extremist language.

To detect anger and sadness, they relied on dictionaries from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool. The anger dictionary includes 181 words such as “hate,” “mad,” “angry,” and “frustrated,” while the sadness dictionary includes 134 words such as “sad,” “disappoint,” and “cry.” To assess violent extremism, they used a custom dictionary containing 174 words organized into three categories: verbs describing violence (e.g., “stab,” “kill,” “rape”), nouns for weapons (e.g., “gun,” “knife,” “acid”), and nouns used to dehumanize out-groups (e.g., “femoids,” “roasties,” “curries”).

The researchers then compared the frequency of these types of language on the incel forum to typical language use on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

Their findings showed that prolific users on the incel forum expressed significantly more anger than users on the other platforms. However, they did not express greater sadness. In contrast, violent extremist language—while rare or absent on the other platforms—was frequently present on the incel forum.

To explore how language changed over time, the researchers examined posts from users when they first joined the forum. They found that new users already displayed high levels of anger in their initial posts. Although expressions of anger, sadness, and extremist language increased slightly over time, the rise plateaued, suggesting no ongoing escalation.

These findings suggest that many users arrive at the forum already immersed in the incel worldview. The increase in extreme or emotionally charged language appears to stabilize rather than intensify with continued participation. The researchers believe this points to exposure and alignment with incel ideology happening elsewhere online, prior to forum membership.

“Our findings revealed that incels exhibited elevated levels of anger compared to other social media platforms. Additionally, a correlation was found between anger and the use of violent and extremist language, suggesting that anger may serve as a precursor to adopting extremist rhetoric. Furthermore, the findings suggest the possibility that individuals who join the forum often bring with them preexisting emotional distress in the form of anger and sadness, which is reflected in their forum posts,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the expressions of anger, sadness, and extremist views on an incel online forum. However, it should be noted that the study analyzed comments made in a very specific time period on one specific platform. Language use can change over time and it can be different in other online communities.

The paper, “The Angry Echo Chamber: A Study of Extremist and Emotional Language Changes in Incel Communities Over Time,” was authored by Melissa S. de Roos, Laura Veldhuizen-Ochodničanová, and Alexis Hanna.