From Isolation to Desolation: Investigating Self-Harm Discussions in Incel Communities

Abstract

Incel communities have recently attracted the public's interest mainly due to their high degree of extreme views and involvement in real-world violence. A common theme in Incel communities is self-harm discussions. Despite this, beyond small-scale qualitative analyses of self-harm discussions in Incel communities, we lack a large-scale quantitative understanding of how Incels discuss self-harm and how it differs from mainstream communities. In this work, we aim to demystify self-harm discussions in Incel communities using a data-driven approach and understand how Incels differentiate from mainstream communities. We use a dataset of 6.4M posts from 18 Incel subreddits and 2.4M posts from an Incel forum, as well as 5.8M posts from two mainstream subreddits discussing mental health. Using word embedding approaches, temporal analyses, topic modeling, and qualitative analysis, we shed light on self-harm discussions in Incel and mainstream communities and their evolution over time. We find substantial differences in the language related to self-harm deployed among the communities; we find that Incels use niche terms related to self-harm, which is not the case in mainstream communities. We observe that over time, language related to self-harm evolves considerably more among Incels than in mainstream communities. Also, we observe that negative perception of their physical appearance is the most recurrent theme in self-harm conversations for Incels, which does not feature in mainstream communities. Finally, by analyzing social factors, we find that Substance abuse is the most closely associated social factor to self-harm in Incel and mainstream communities and that Physical Appearance, over time, is becoming increasingly closely related to self-harm discussions in Incel communities.