=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2578/DARLIAP3
|storemode=property
|title=Reddit Mining to Understand Gendered Movements
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2578/DARLIAP3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2578
|authors=Abeer Khan,Lukasz Golab
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/edbt/KhanG20
}}
==Reddit Mining to Understand Gendered Movements==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2578/DARLIAP3.pdf
Reddit Mining to Understand Gendered Movements
Abeer Khan Lukasz Golab
University of Waterloo, Canada University of Waterloo, Canada
abeer.khan@uwaterloo.ca lgolab@uwaterloo.ca
ABSTRACT who comment on r/Feminism are similar to groups who are help-
We mine gender-oriented Reddit forums, r/Feminism, r/MensRights, ful to various minority groups (related to disability, race, and
and r/TheRedPill, to understand gendered movements and their orientation), provide counseling to victims of sexual violence,
participants. Our methods include topic modelling using non- and promote body acceptance.
negative matrix factorization, and analyzing user commenting The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
activity. Our analysis leads to three main findings. First, gendered discusses related work. Section 3 describes the data and methods.
forums discuss workplace sexism, personal safety, rape, and le- Section 4 presents the results, and Section 5 concludes the paper.
gal issues among other gender issues, and different forums have
different perspectives on these issues. Second, users commenting
2 RELATED WORK
on r/MensRights are similar to users who are politically right
leaning and associated with sexist or racist content, whereas LaViolette et al. [21] examined over 670,000 comments made in
users commenting on r/Feminism are similar to those who sup- two gendered forums on Reddit, Men’s Rights and Men’s Libera-
port minorities, body acceptance, and survivors of sexual assault. tion. They used text classification models and qualitative analysis,
Third, users commenting on r/TheRedPill are similar to those and identified the linguistic features that distinguish Men’s Rights
who do not believe in the equality of race or gender. and Men’s Liberation. Words that were unique to Men’s Rights
included criminality, law and the justice system-related words
such as accusation, arrest, charge, etc. Men’s Liberation contained
1 INTRODUCTION many more identity and emotion-oriented phrases such as gen-
Gender equality is one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Devel- dered, feminine, vulnerable, and insecurity. Lucy et al. [24] also
opment Goals. We observe that social media have recently been linguistically analyzed several gendered communities on Reddit.
used to discuss sensitive gender-related issues, as evidenced by They found that these communities have few users in common
the hashtags #ididnotreport and #MeToo. Thus, our goal in this pa- but are textually similar, and that the same word is sometimes
per is to contribute to the understanding of gender issues through associated with different sentiments when used by different gen-
social media mining. We identified three large gender-oriented dered communities. For example, the word “obsessed” is used
forums on Reddit: r/Feminism, r/MensRights, and r/TheRedPill, positively by a community discussing female fashion but is used
and we address the following questions. negatively by a Men’s Rights community. Furthermore, the com-
ments made by female and male fashion advice groups had high
(1) What are the issues discussed on these forums?
text similarity, but low user similarity. These works were linguis-
(2) What are the characteristics of users commenting on these
tic and did not focus on the topics or issues discussed, which we
forums?
analyze in this work.
To answer the first question, we use topic modelling, specifi- Field et al. [13] studied how individuals were portrayed in
cally non-negative matrix factorization. Since Reddit users are nearly 30,000 news articles covering the #MeToo movement. They
not required to reveal any personal information, we address the found that these articles are sympathetic towards women who
challenge of understanding users by analyzing their comments have experienced sexual harassment, and present accused men as
on other, gender-neutral, Reddit forums. powerful. In contrast, we examine the discourse of a movement
We discovered that the above gendered forums discuss issues rather than its media coverage, in order to understand the issues
such as family law, sexual violence, personal safety, dating, con- and people involved, rather than how they are portrayed.
sent, media representation, workplace sexism, workplace harass- A survey of Men’s Rights users on Reddit discovered that sur-
ment, criminal justice system, pink tax, and gender differences vey participants were mostly male, white, between the ages of 17
in education. However, different gendered movements offer dif- to 20, indifferent to religion, and politically strongly conservative
ferent perspectives on these issues. For example, r/MensRights [44]. However, this survey naturally suffers from a self-selection
primarily discusses false rape accusations in addition to sexual bias, whereas our analysis uses all of Men’s Rights discourses.
assault faced by men, whereas r/Feminism primarily discusses Next, we review research on analyzing the issues pursued by
sexual assault faced by women. gendered movements.
Furthermore, we found that users who comment on r/TheRedPill Prior work shows that Feminism has focused on a variety
are similar to those who comment on r/MensRights and r/Incels (a of legal and social equality issues that influence women, evolv-
forum for those describing themselves as “involuntarily celibate”), ing through the decades. These issues included the right to vote,
and to those who reject the idea of equality of race and gender. equality in the workplace, and violence against women [8, 18, 33].
Second, users who comment on r/MensRights are similar to those These analyses are either historical (documenting the Feminist
commenting on politically conservative forums and those dis- movement throughout the 19th and 20th centuries) or qualitative
cussing content known to be racist and misogynist. Third, users (using interviews and surveys). Moreover, contemporary analysis
of Feminism often focuses on sexual violence, for example ex-
© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its author(s). Published in the Workshop Proceed-
ings of the EDBT/ICDT 2020 Joint Conference (March 30-April 2, 2020, Copenhagen, amining the #MeToo and #Intersectionality movements [13, 43],
Denmark) on CEUR-WS.org. Use permitted under Creative Commons License At- whereas we analyze all current Feminist issues that emerge in
tribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Reddit discussions.
Table 1: Statistics of gendered subreddits Table 2: Number of posts remaining for content analysis
subreddit # subscribers # posts # comments # users Gendered subreddit Before cleaning After cleaning
# # %
r/TheRedPill 250K 47K 1.6M 80K
r/MensRights 170K 80K 1.6M 100K r/TheRedPill 47K 8K 18.2%
r/Feminism 90K 40K 170K 30K r/MensRights 80K 8K 10.9%
r/AskMen 500K 200K 6.5M 330K r/Feminism 40K 2K 4.5%
r/AskWomen 500K 170K 5.5M 250K r/AskMen 200K 20K 9.5%
r/AskWomen 170K 7K 4.6%
Figure 2: Sample topic descriptors produced by NMF for
r/Mensrights. Uninformative words are circled.
Figure 1: Overview of our methodology that uses posts and
comments to understand content and people, respectively 3.1 Content Analysis
For each gendered subreddit, we run topic modelling over the
Scholarly and popular media analyses of the issues discussed posts to extract the topics being discussed. We omit comments on
by movements such as Men’s Rights and The Red Pill are similarly posts as we found them to contain little additional information
historical or qualitative. Ging [16] analyzed the online discourse about the topic.
of The Red Pill and associated communities to identify theories Preprocessing: We perform standard text preprocessing such
about masculinity adopted by these communities. Men’s Rights as word stemming and stopword removal, removal of rare (occur-
groups were found to discuss issues such as family courts, male ring in under 1% posts) and frequent (occurring in over 95% posts)
circumcision, domestic violence, and education [1, 26, 29, 40]. words, as well as other social media specific pre-processing using
Ekphrasis [3]. Following prior work on Reddit text mining [19],
3 DATA AND METHODS we discard posts that are too short (fewer than 256 characters)
or too long (over 4096 characters). Table 2 shows the number of
Reddit (reddit.com) is a social curation website where registered
posts remaining for analysis (there were many short posts that
users submit content in the form of links or text posts. Users form
were discarded). We express each post as a Term Frequency -
interest-based forums called subreddits (for example, r/lifehacks
Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) vector.
or r/StarWars), and within these forums they post relevant con-
Topic Modelling: Next, for each of the five gender-oriented
tent. Other users can comment on these posts. A subreddit’s
subreddits, we run the Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)
name and optional description suggests the main interest of its
topic modelling algorithm [42]3 . We set K, the number of topics,
users. We use the terms “forum”, “interest group”, and “subreddit”
to 504 . NMF extracts K topics in the form of “topic descriptors”
interchangeably. There are over a million different subreddits.
(ranked lists of words that describe each topic). It also produces
Similar to Lucy et al. [24], we identified the largest subred-
a ranked list of most suitable topics for each post, and we label
dits (in terms of the number of subscribers) with clearly gender-
each post with its top-ranked topic.
oriented names: r/TwoXChromosomes, r/AskMen, r/AskWomen,
Figure 2 shows examples of the topic descriptors produced by
r/TheRedPill, r/TrollYChromosome, r/MensRights, r/Feminism.
NMF for r/MensRights. We observed many uninformative terms
At the time of selection, all of these subreddits had more than
despite our preprocessing. These terms did not provide informa-
90,000 subscribers. We focus on r/TheRedPill, r/MensRights, and
tion about what is distinctive about a topic. They included terms
r/Feminism, which are aligned with gendered movements. We also
such as “would”, “else”, and “also”, besides domain-specific terms
compare these forums to r/AskMen and r/AskWomen, which are
such as “woman” and “man” that are common in gendered text.
general Q&A forums seeking advice from men’s and women’s per-
We removed these words from the posts and re-executed NMF
spectives, respectively. We discard r/TwoXChromosomes since
to discover more informative topic descriptors. We thus itera-
it is a “default” subreddit (to which users were automatically
tively built a custom stop-list of uninformative terms until NMF
subscribed if they created a Reddit account before 2017). We also
produced topic descriptors without any uninformative words
discard r/TrollYChromosome since we observed that its users
in its top 15 words. Custom stop-lists have had to be similarly
primarily share images with little text.
iteratively built by prior work using topic modelling [7, 37].
Our analysis was conducted on data publicly available on
Perspectives: We use NMF to extra 50 topics from each of the
Google Big Query1 . We use three years of Reddit posts and com-
five gendered subreddits. We read these 250 topic descriptors, and
ments, from December 2015 to December 2018. The source code
is available on our project Github2 . Table 1 shows the number of 3 We tested two other topic modelling algorithms: LDA and SeaNMF [35]. However,
posts, comments, and subscribers associated with the gendered as observed in previous work [31], we found that many topics produced by LDA were
subreddits. Figure 1 summarizes our methodology, consisting of redundant, i.e., several topics were described with the same words. Furthermore,
SeaNMF and NMF produced similar topics for the same values of K , but NMF was
content analysis (topic modelling) and user analysis (commenting faster. Since topic modelling relies on an interactively built custom stop-list, we
activity). We discuss the details below. chose a model that converges (and hence can be iterated over) faster.
4 We tested different values of K between 10 and 400, and found that smaller values
1 https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/ of K produced topics that were too broad, whereas larger values of K led to duplicate
2 https://github.com/abeer-khan/Reddit-Gender-Movements topics.
Table 3: Similar topics discussed in different subreddits
r/MensRights r/Feminism
33: rape rapist cultur sex consent 2: rape victim accus blame rapist
fals drunk report teach crime law report percent violenc porn
convict fact campus forc drunk case consent alleg fals
india
15-20 random posts clustered under each topic. We noticed that
several topics in different (and often within the same) subreddits
referred to similar themes, and that different subreddits may have
different opinions on the same topic. For example, consider the Figure 3: Every subreddit can be expressed as a vector of
two topics shown in Table 3 that demonstrate a similar topic user overlap values with informative subreddits, later con-
(rape) discussed in both r/MensRights and r/Feminism (albeit, verted to PPMI. Subreddits whose user bases have more
upon our reading, slightly differently). similar interests will have a higher cosine similarity.
Themes: Based on our reading of the topic descriptors and
sample posts, we manually merge similar topics and assign labels
to them. After merging, we obtain 24 topics, which we refer to as
themes. Examples of themes include Work, Family, and Education;
see Table 4 for a complete list. As we will show, these themes may
be discussed with different perspectives in different gendered
subreddits.
3.2 Commenting Similarity
We now identify other subreddits that users commenting on
r/Feminism, r/MensRights and r/TheRedPill are similar to in
terms of their interests. The intuition behind our method is as fol-
lows. If we find that, say, the users commenting on r/MensRights
and the users commenting on r/gardening also comment on the
same additional subreddits, then we would conclude that the
users of r/MensRights and r/gardening are similar [25]. Figure 4: Subreddit user overlap matrix. Each cell is con-
In this analysis, we express each subreddit in terms of how verted into its PPMI.
many users (defined as those who commented in it at least once) it
has in common with all the informative subreddits on Reddit; our
definition of informativeness will be clarified shortly. For now, analogous to converting term frequencies to tf-idf [30]. For exam-
assume that there are only two informative subreddits: r/pets and ple, converting the user overlap between r/MensRights and r/pets,
r/gardening. We calculate the number of users each of r/Feminism, represented as uo(r /MensRiдhts, r /pets), to PPMI involves nor-
r/MensRights and r/TheRedPill have in common (also called user malizing the overlap by the total number of users r/MensRights
overlap) with each of r/pets and r/gardening. These user overlaps has in common with the subreddits in I (i.e., the informative
are represented as the axes in Figure 3, and each subreddit is subreddits, horizontally circled in Figure 4), and with the total
represented as a vector. In the figure, for example, r/Feminism is number of users r/pets has in common with other subreddits (ver-
assumed to have three users in common with r/gardening and tically circled in Figure 4). We then find the logarithm (base 2) of
six with r/pets. this normalized value and we zero out negative values. Equations
We measure the distance between subreddits using cosine sim- 1 – 3 summarize this process for any two subreddits with indices
ilarity. There are 91292 subreddits where a user has commented m and n, represented as sm and sn respectively.
at least once.
Similar to how text mining methods only use informative uo(sm , s n )
normal ize(sm , s n ) = Í (1)
, s i ) × 91292
j=1 uo(s n , s j )
Í
terms that are not too rarely or too frequently used, we only s i ∈I uo(s m
measure user overlap with informative subreddits, defined as
P M I (sm , s n ) = log2 [normal ize(sm , s n )] (2)
those which are commented on by enough users as well as not
too many users. Specifically, we rank subreddits by the number (
of distinct users who have commented on them and choose the P M I (sm , s n ), if P M I (sm , s n ) ≥ 0
P P M I (sm , s n ) = (3)
subreddits ranked between the top 200 to 2000. There were 2047 0, otherwise
such informative subreddits, referred to as I . The top 200 subred-
dits are extremely popular and every subreddit has many users in This commenting similarity method is akin to Latent Seman-
common with them. Conversely, subreddits ranked below 2000 tic Analysis (LSA), a natural language processing technique to
are not as popular and no other subreddit has many users in determine document similarity.
common with them.
Furthermore, we convert the user overlap between each pair 3.3 Limitations and Assumptions
of subreddits into positive pointwise mutual information (PPMI), There are several limitations of our methodology.
(1) The iterative building of custom stop-lists for topic mod-
elling and organizing topics into themes is subjective.
(2) To decide whether a theme is popular within a subreddit,
we only count the number of posts labelled as belonging to
that theme. We do not consider the number of comments,
views, upvotes or downvotes.
(3) Our user analysis involves retrieving subreddits most simi-
lar to gendered subreddits. Thus, our results only represent
user interests on Reddit. We cannot capture user interests
that are not explicitly represented as Reddit forums. For
example, if the users of r/MensRights are interested in
gardening, but there is no gardening subreddit, then we
would not discover the interest of r/MensRights users in
gardening.
Furthermore, we emphasize that we do not attempt to verify
Figure 5: Perspectives on Health / Abuse.
whether or not the claims made by movements are true.
4 RESULTS • r/AskMen and r/AskWomen posts describe dealing with
We now present the results of our content analysis (Section 4.1) emotions, physical abuse, mental health issues, and find-
and user analysis (Section 4.2). ing happiness. r/AskWomen posts additionally refer to
personal safety and sexual assault.
4.1 Themes and Perspectives There were similar differences in perspectives in most of the
We discovered 24 themes discussed across gendered subreddits. other themes. For example, r/TheRedPill posts mention race in
Table 4 lists the themes and the proportion of posts in each the context of femininity, opining that black women may be less
subreddit that discuss each theme. feminine, whereas r/MensRights posts discuss racial bias against
Not all themes are equally discussed by all subreddits. Gendered men such as a higher number of rape accusations against black
Movements, Political Issues, Criminal Justice System, and Other men, and racism against non-minority races (Figure 7).
Social Issues were mentioned only by the three gendered move-
ment subreddits. Other themes were discussed only in r/AskMen
and r/AskWomen. These were Drinking, Cars, Other Health Is-
sues, Living Concerns, Food, Age, and Hobbies. Most themes were
discussed across several subreddits in different contexts.
We now examine the contexts in which different subreddits
discussed various themes. Due to space constraints, we discuss
only Health / Abuse in detail and we summarize some of the
other themes and perspectives in Figures 6 –15. These figures do
Figure 6: Perspectives on Criminal Justice System.
not show the perspectives of r/AskMen and r/AskWomen, for
which we found fewer differences in perspectives than for the
movement subreddits.
• Posts in both r/Feminism and r/MensRights discuss top-
ics such as rape, harassment, consent, and culture (for
example, hookup, sex, or rape culture in society).
• r/Feminism posts seek help for dealing with violence faced
in one’s life. Posts also mention societal problems such as
rape jokes and rape culture.
• r/MensRights posts similarly seek help dealing with vi-
olence against men. Posts also discuss repercussions of
accusations against men, with topics such as false accu- Figure 7: Perspectives on Other Social Issues.
sations, due process, and regret after sexual encounters.
r/MensRights posts discuss other forms of abuse against Drinking, Cars, Other Health Issues, Living Concerns (for
men, for example, male genital mutilation (MGM, or child- instance, roommates or affordable housing), Food, Age, and Hob-
hood circumcision) and domestic violence against men. bies were discussed only by r/AskMen and r/AskWomen, and in
They also discuss health problems such as increasing rates similar contexts.
of suicide and mental health issues among men.
• r/TheRedPill posts are noticeably different than r/MensRights 4.2 User Interest Similarity
and r/Feminism. r/TheRedPill posts discuss rape in the con- In this section, we discuss the people involved in gendered move-
text of false accusations, mentioning how concepts such ments. We examine the subreddits that are most similar to r/TheRedPill,
as feminine imperative, social justice warriors, or Fem- r/MensRights, and r/Feminism in terms of their user interests, as
inism could contribute to women falsely accusing men measured by where they comment. The user bases of two subred-
of rape. r/TheRedPill posts also talk about the emotional dits are similar to each other in terms of interest if they tend to
manipulation of and by women. comment on discussions in the same subreddits. The groups who
Table 4: Themes discussed across gendered forums. The % for each subreddit is with respect to the total # of posts in that
subreddit. The “Total” % is with respect to the total # of posts in our corpus. Some topics were deemed too noisy and were
discarded (bottom row)
Ind Themes r/AskMen r/AskWomen r/TheRedPill r/MensRights r/Feminism Total
# % # % # % # % # % # %
1 Self Esteem / Grooming 2341 18.40 1305 26.12 1480 21.64 0 0 42 3.02 5168 15.31
2 Dating / Flirting 2981 23.43 893 17.87 1351 19.76 0 0 28 2.01 5253 15.56
3 Relationships 2124 16.69 903 18.07 990 14.48 714 9.14 61 4.38 4792 14.19
4 Work 1175 9.23 563 11.27 180 2.63 384 4.91 87 6.25 2389 7.08
5 Family 869 6.83 175 3.50 484 7.08 795 10.17 29 2.08 2352 6.97
6 Sex / Pornography 957 7.52 208 4.16 426 6.23 0 0 58 4.17 1649 4.88
7 Gendered Movements 0 0 0 0 1887 27.60 1059 13.55 256 18.39 3202 9.48
8 Other Gender Issues 0 0 199 3.98 190 2.78 811 10.38 271 19.47 1471 4.36
9 Media 0 0 168 3.36 288 4.21 876 11.21 138 9.91 1470 4.35
10 Education 688 5.41 0 0 156 2.28 541 6.92 51 3.66 1436 4.25
11 Money 412 3.24 149 2.98 180 2.63 178 2.28 0 0 919 2.72
12 Health / Abuse 575 4.52 569 11.39 314 4.59 1414 18.10 127 9.12 2999 8.88
13 Political Issues 0 0 0 0 0 0 157 2.01 68 4.89 225 0.67
14 Reproductive Issues 0 0 139 2.78 0 0 146 1.87 24 1.72 309 0.92
15 Criminal Justice System 0 0 0 0 0 0 201 2.57 0 0 201 0.60
16 Sports / Video Games 435 3.42 134 2.68 0 0 0 0 26 1.87 595 1.76
17 Other Social Issues 0 0 0 0 130 1.90 182 2.33 109 7.83 421 1.25
18 Drinking 344 2.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 344 1.02
19 Cars 275 2.16 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 275 0.81
20 Other Health Issues 0 0 141 2.82 0 0 0 0 0 0 141 0.42
21 Living Concerns 381 2.99 322 6.45 0 0 0 0 0 0 703 2.08
22 Food 316 2.48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 316 0.94
23 Age 288 2.26 137 2.74 0 0 0 0 0 0 425 1.26
24 Hobbies 249 1.96 134 2.68 0 0 0 0 0 0 383 1.13
Total 14410 38.49 6139 16.40 8056 21.52 7458 19.92 1375 3.67 37438 100
Noisy posts discarded 4363 1588 485 1181 422 8039
Figure 10: Perspectives on Self Esteem / Grooming.
Figure 8: Perspectives on Education.
Figure 11: Perspectives on Dating / Flirting.
Figure 9: Perspectives on Political Issues.
are most similar to the people involved in gendered subreddits masturbation, often to the benefit of one’s social life), other
are shown in Table 5. Following are the key insights. movements related to red pill theories (such as r/marriedredpill,
• The user bases of r/TheRedPill and r/MensRights are simi- r/PurplePillDebate, r/RedPillWomen, and r/askMRP), and
lar to each other. some social movements associated with men (for example,
• r/TheRedPill users are similar to those interested in r/seduction, r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), r/MensRights,
r/steroids, r/NoFap (for abstaining from pornography and and r/Incels).
• The users of r/Feminism are similar to those with a posi-
tive attitude towards social justice (r/socialjustice101 and
r/SRSDiscussion). They are also similar to the user bases
of minority groups (e.g., r/genderqueer, r/bisexual, and
r/blackladies).
• Other groups r/Feminism is similar to include disabili-
ties (e.g., r/ADHD, r/disability, and r/aspergirls), gaming
(r/GirlGamers), rape counseling, and a forum to share emo-
tional issues (r/offmychest).
Figure 12: Perspectives on Work. • r/Feminism users are also similar to an interest group
against r/MensRights (r/againstmensrights), and to a fo-
rum dedicated to discussing men’s rights in a positive
light (r/MensLib). According to r/MensLib’s administra-
tors, r/MensRights and r/MensLib are not the same.
• There are no interest groups that both r/MensRights and
r/Feminism are similar to, nor are they similar to each
other.
• The users of r/MensRights and r/Feminism are similar
to the users of many other subreddits, the top few of
which are shown in Table 5. Consistent with previous
sections, the users of r/AskMen and r/AskWomen are sim-
ilar to each other. They are similar to those interested
Figure 13: Perspectives on Family. in relationships, dating, divorce, sex, jobs, and other gen-
eral advice. The subreddits that r/AskMen is similar to
but r/AskWomen is not are: r/asktrp (ask the red pill),
r/PurplePillDebate (neutral discussion of sex and gen-
der), r/socialskills, r/seduction, and a few others pertain-
ing to looks (r/amiugly and r/tall). Subreddits similar to
r/AskWomen but not r/AskMen are related to health (often
women’s), parenting, self-grooming, legal advice, etc.
5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
We presented a data mining study of social movements related to
gender using a large social media corpus (Reddit). We used text
Figure 14: Perspectives on Gendered Movements. mining and user overlap methods to understand the issues being
discussed by, and the people involved with, these movements.
Our main findings are as follows.
(1) r/TheRedPill discusses daily life topics such as dating,
power, and women using a distinctive shared vernacular
and mantras. Prior work has also observed the existence of
such a collective identity among r/TheRedPill users [12].
(2) r/TheRedPill users are similar to those of Men Going Their
Own Way (MGTOW), Incels, and Men’s Rights subred-
Figure 15: Perspectives on Sports / Video Games.
dits, perhaps because they use similar red / blue / black
pill metaphors to describe their beliefs [23, 39]. A person
• r/TheRedPill users are also similar to the user base of who accepts the red pill has realized the gynocentric in-
r/DarkEnlightenment, a subreddit that is anti-liberal, anti- justice in the world. r/TheRedPill users are also similar to
democratic, and anti-egalitarianism (in terms of both gen- people who reject egalitarianism of race or gender. More-
der and race). over, they are similar to the people who are interested in
• r/TheRedPill is similar to a subreddit dedicated to the work r/JordanPeterson. This could be a reason for (or a result of)
of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor their perspectives on relationships and dating (including
who calls for a return to traditional gender roles [22]. their discussions on race and femininity).
• r/MensRights users are similar to those of subreddits that (3) r/MensRights posts are political, and discuss issues that
are politically right leaning (e.g., r/HillaryForPrison, posters believe affect men more than women; e.g., family
r/Ask_The_Donald, r/Conservative, r/Libertarian, r/altright). law, health, money, abuse, relationships, and education,
• r/MensRights is similar to r/MGTOW users. where they discuss systems biased in favour of women, and
• r/MensRights users are also similar to the user bases of false rape accusations. This has been observed in Men’s
r/KotakuInAction and r/CringeAnarchy, known to con- Rights groups in the past [1, 2, 17, 28, 29].
tain racist and sexist content. They are further similar to (4) r/MensRights users are similar to those of politically con-
people who discuss social justice warriors and their faults servative subreddits, confirming prior observations of the
(r/SRSsucks and r/SocialJusticeInAction). conservative ideologies of Men’s Rights activists [4, 9, 27,
Table 5: Subreddits similar to gendered subreddits in terms of commenting activity
Subreddit Similar subreddits
r/TheRedPill asktrp, MGTOW, seduction, marriedredpill, PurplePillDebate, WhereAreAllTheGoodMen, askMRP, JordanPeterson, NoFap,
DarkEnlightenment, RedPillWomen, Incels, MensRights, steroids
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WhereAreAllTheGoodMen, subredditcancer, ShitPoliticsSays, ImGoingToHellForThis, conspiracy, OffensiveSpeech, AskThe_Donald,
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antifa, KotakuInAction, worldpolitics, AskTrumpSupporters, Conservative, MGTOW, TheRedPill, Shitstatistssay, DebateAltRight,
nottheonion, rage, CringeAnarchy
r/Feminism FemmeThoughts, badwomensanatomy, GirlGamers, GenderCynical, genderqueer, feminisms, bisexual, AskTrollX, againstmensrights,
disability, BodyAcceptance, ADHD, blackladies, women, vegetarian, TwoXChromosomes, asexuality, TheBluePill, TransSpace,
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r/AskMen OkCupid, dating_advice, relationship_advice, AskMenOver30, datingoverthirty, dating, relationships, Advice, AskWomen,
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44]. Conservative viewpoints also contribute to, or are Liberation movement that discusses men’s issues and is
gravitated towards because of, the different perspectives an ally to feminism, as opposed to the men’s rights, red
on topics such as rape – some stances Men’s Rights takes pill, and incel movements.
(for instance, discussions of due process, Title IX, male dis- (7) People involved with r/TheRedPill and r/MensRights are
posability, father figures) are similar to reports from right similar. This could be attributed to the interest both sub-
leaning media such as Breitbart and Fox News [6, 38]. reddits have in conservative politics. Dignam et al. [12]
r/MensRights users are similar to those who express a showed that r/TheRedPill forum contributed to Trump’s
dislike for social justice warriors, as echoed by observa- election although the community is generally apolitical.
tions in popular media [5]. They are similar to communi- (8) In contrast, r/MensRights and r/Feminism users are dis-
ties known to have sexist and racist undertones, which similar. This could be because of the anti-Feminist roots
may explain the accusations of misogyny and racism that of the Men’s Rights Movement [1, 41], that are echoed in
have been made against Men’s Rights activists in the past r/MensRights posts discussing Gendered Movements.
[14, 27]. They are also similar to an atheism-related group, (9) Finally, we compare movements related to gender with
which falls in line with a prior small scale survey on generic gendered subreddits (r/AskMen and r/AskWomen).
r/MensRights, where 94% of survey respondents did not Understandably, these generic gendered subreddits do
subscribe to a religion [44]. not contain much political content. The users of these
(5) r/Feminism posts are also political and discuss issues that groups, the themes they discuss, and their perspectives
impact women as well as other minorities. These issues are more similar to each other. The only difference is that
include workplace sexism, workplace harassment, rape, r/AskWomen discusses personal safety, assault, reproduc-
abuse, pink tax, cultural appropriation, and representation. tive issues, saying no when dating, and sexism.
These issues have been observed to be relevant among
other Feminist groups as well [8, 10, 11, 15, 20, 34, 36]. We emphasize that our results should be used carefully due the
(6) r/Feminism users are similar to minority groups span- following confounding factors.
ning race, orientation, and disability. They are also sim-
a. Choice of platform: Over two-thirds of Reddit users are
ilar to those involved with body acceptance subreddits,
male, and majority are young adults5 . Our results may be
in line with the finding that exposure to Feminist theo-
dominated by the users in this demographic. They may
ries is correlated with positive changes in body image
also not be representative of people who are involved with
among women [32]. They are similar to r/rapecounseling
gendered movements, but do not use Reddit.
that provides support to victims of sexual violence. This
b. Choice of subreddits: Our decision to use larger sub-
may be a manifestation of recent Feminist usage of inter-
reddits provides evidence to support our results but also
net tools to help combat sexual violence [43]. r/Feminism
ignores the opinions of smaller groups of people involved
is similar to r/GirlGamers, a venue for women gamers
with these movements. For example, our results may not be
to discuss and engage in gaming, and discuss the influ-
representative of the people who frequent r/RedPillWomen
ence of their gender on their gaming experiences. This
(30,000 subscribers) and r/male_feminists (72 subscribers).
user similarity may have influenced r/Feminism’s perspec-
c. Choice of users: We defined users as those who post
tives on Sports / Video Games. r/Feminism is also similar
(to identify issues) or comment (to understand people).
to r/againstmensrights, which is interesting since Men’s
Our results are not representative of those involved more
Rights has been said to be a reactionary movement to Fem-
passively, such as those who only read content.
inism in prior work [1, 41]. On the other hand, r/Feminism
is similar to r/MensLib. r/MensLib represents the Men’s 5 https://www.pewinternet.org/2013/07/03/6-of-online-adults-are-reddit-users/
We believe that our findings are relevant to policy decisions [19] Mike Swarbrick Jones. 2018. The Reddit Self-Post Classification Task (RSPCT):
regarding men and women. We provide examples below. a highly multiclass dataset for text classification (PREPRINT). (2018).
[20] Michael S Kimmel. 1995. The politics of manhood: Profeminist men respond to
the mythopoetic men’s movement (and the mythopoetic leaders answer). Temple
(1) Workplace: It is important to establish guidelines on University Press.
acceptable workplace etiquette, communication, and be- [21] Jack LaViolette and Bernie Hogan. 2019. Using Platform Signals for Distin-
haviour, in addition to guidelines on what to do if these guishing Discourses: The Case of Men’s Rights and Men’s Liberation on Reddit.
In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media,
expectations are not met. Vol. 13. 323–334.
(2) Personal safety: Our analysis of comments on gendered [22] Alison Lefkovitz. 2018. Jordan Peterson and the return of the men’s
forums indicates that some users do not feel safe in the rights movement https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/
wp/2018/07/24/before-jordan-peterson-there-were-mens-rights-activists/
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(3) Counseling: The support provided by r/rapecounseling [24] Li Lucy and Julia Mendelsohn. 2018. Using Sentiment Induction to Understand
highlights the importance of support for victims of rape Variation in Gendered Online Communities. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.07061
and violence. (2018).
[25] Trevor Martin. 2017. Dissecting Trump’s most rabid online following. FiveThir-
(4) Health: Governments may investigate systemic health tyEight (2017).
issues such as mental health problems and suicide, which [26] Angela Melville and Rosemary Hunter. 2001. As everybody knows-countering
are frequently mentioned in men’s movement discussions. myths of gender bias in family law. Griffith L. Rev. 10 (2001), 124.
[27] Robert Menzies. 2007. Virtual backlash: Representations of men’s ‘rights’ and
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etal help for gender-oriented issues such as military drafts, vs. distance vectors from dictionaries. In Proceedings of the 15th conference on
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[31] Derek O’callaghan, Derek Greene, Joe Carthy, and Pádraig Cunningham. 2015.
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