Grievance Articulation and Community Reactions in the Men’s Rights Movement Online

Abstract

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.

Real Talk About Fake News: Identity Language and Disconnected Networks of the US Public’s “Fake News” Discourse on Twitter

“…Specifically, we look at users’ retweeting behaviors through which they participate in diffuse conversations online (Boyd et al, 2010). Since people tend to engage with content consistent with their political beliefs or coming from an ingroup source by commenting, sharing, or retweeting (Rafail & Freitas, 2019; Yuan et al, 2019), retweet networks are usually segregated into ideology-based clusters with a low level of connectivity (e.g., Conover et al, 2011). Hence, we expect that, as ordinary Twitter users tend to share messages from their ideological group, the two “fake news” discourses propagated within the liberal and conservative retweet networks should be highly disconnected (H3).…”

Racializing misogyny: Sexuality and gender in the new online white nationalism

“…Although these sites tend not to emphasize white supremacy explicitly, their focus on criticizing feminism and celebrating virile, heterosexual patriarchy provides a cohesive overlap to the gender politics of white nationalism. A backlash against feminism, particularly a critique that feminism has “gone too far” and is now victimizing men, is a central complaint in this online community (Rafail and Freitas 2019), as evidenced by the recent Twitter campaign “Him Too” that frames men as victims of false accusations of sexual assault. “Incels,” men who identify as involuntarily celibate, are a large part of this community (Donnelly et al.…”

#MeToo or #MenToo? Expressions of Backlash and Masculinity Politics in the #MeToo Era

“…The MRM's online visibility relative to its limited movement membership illustrates this, exemplified by the MRA participants in this study, most of whom saw themselves as MRM "followers" rather than "activists". This may reflect the dynamics of online activism, whereby individuals can support and engage with a movement's ideas anonymously and with minimal commitment (Rafail & Freitas, 2019).…”