Center for Countering Digital Hate — The Incelosphere

What the study found

The Center for Countering Digital Hate's Incelosphere report analysed almost 1.2 million posts made over an 18-month period on the largest incel forum. It found that the forum drew around 2.6 million average monthly visits and had 17,000 members, with 406 power users producing 74.6 per cent of all posts, and that one in five posts featured misogynistic, racist, antisemitic or anti-LGBTQ+ language. The report also recorded a 59 per cent increase in terms and codewords relating to acts of mass violence and noted boys as young as 15 in the community. ^[1]

rape mentioned on average every 29 minutes with 89 per cent of posters in relevant discussions supportive of sexual violence against women

^[1]

Why it matters here

This report is one of the most-cited attempts to quantify the scale and content of activity on the largest incel forum, documenting both its reach and the prevalence of rhetoric supportive of sexual and mass violence. Those figures are frequently invoked in debates over are incels a terror threat?, where the question is how far violent online rhetoric translates into offline harm. The report measures the volume and tone of posts rather than counting acts of violence, so it speaks to the character of the discourse rather than to the number of attacks recorded.