Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2023
Publication Title
Democratic Theory
Volume
10
Issue
2
Pages
1-13
Publisher Name
Berghahn Journals
Abstract
style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) have recently gained notoriety for their aggressive, often violent, misogyny, yet incels were not always an antidemocratic social group. They thus pose a challenge for thinking about democracy and identity in (anonymous) digital environments: how can we create spaces for marginalized social groups while ensuring the resulting identities remain democratic? While many scholars point to technological affordances or corporate content moderation policies as providing some solutions, in this article I propose a more democratic approach. Drawing from incel wikis and archived forum posts from two early incel communities—IncelSupport and LoveShy—I argue that a community's social norms, and the moderation practices required to sustain them, are user-directed interventions that have outsized effects in shaping group identities in democratic ways.
Recommended Citation
Forestal, Jennifer. “This Forum Is NOT A DEMOCRACY”: The Role of Norms and Moderation in Cultivating (Anti)democratic Incel Identities. Democratic Theory, 10, 2: 1-13, 2023. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, Political Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/dt.2023.100207
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s), 2023.
Comments
Author Posting © The Author(s), 2023. This article is posted here by permission of Berghahn Journals for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in Democratic Theory, Vol. 10, Iss. 2 (December 1, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2023.100207.