A Lexicon for Studying Radicalization in Incel Communities
This work addresses the challenge of studying extremist ideologies in online communities for researchers, but it is incremental as it provides a tool rather than new findings.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding radicalization in incel communities by creating a lexicon of their cryptolect terms, derived from analyzing frequent words and structures in online forums from 2016 to 2023, which supports automated analysis for future research.
Incels are an extremist online community of men who believe in an ideology rooted in misogyny, racism, the glorification of violence, and dehumanization. In their online forums, they use an extensive, evolving cryptolect - a set of ingroup terms that have meaning within the group, reflect the ideology, demonstrate membership in the community, and are difficult for outsiders to understand. This paper presents a lexicon with terms and definitions for common incel root words, prefixes, and affixes. The lexicon is text-based for use in automated analysis and is derived via a Qualitative Content Analysis of the most frequent incel words, their structure, and their meaning on five of the most active incel communities from 2016 to 2023. This lexicon will support future work examining radicalization and deradicalization/disengagement within the community.