University of Twente Student Theses
“It's 2023, all that's left of the internet are trolls and bait.” : Examining how the incel community anonymously builds trust online through a content analysis
Mengerink, J. (2023) “It's 2023, all that's left of the internet are trolls and bait.” : Examining how the incel community anonymously builds trust online through a content analysis.
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| Abstract: | Aim: The incel community, one of the more extreme communities within the wider Manosphere has the ideology that one’s life trajectory is determined by a person’s attractivity and gender, thus giving handsome people and women a higher standing in society. In the last few years, the incel ideology has been linked to more than fifty cases of violence. The level of trust between members on online forum incel.is, as well as risk taking has been investigated. The relation that outsiders and trolls might have with these factors has also been examined. Method: Through digital ethnography by way of a content analysis, threads and individual posts on incels.is were sampled for a period of three months. Incels.is was seen as the most fitting place to investigate trust building as the infrastructure allowed for the presence of a true community. In total, 30 threads were encoded, containing a total of 1510 individual posts. Results and conclusion: The difficulty of making an account, as well as the abundance of rules on the forum make it clear that members of the community are aware of the risks involved when posting on the forum and the possible presence of outsiders. Trust is low when it comes to other members, but incels still engage with the community out of a primal desire of human contact. There however is little risk taking. Members also have the feeling that there are a lot of outsiders and/or trolls on the forum, decreasing trust and risk taking even more. Discussion: It is suggested that interviews will be held with members of the community in order to affirm or refute the findings of the content analysis. The role of platform Discord is also discussed, and it is advised to look into trust building and risk taking on this particular communication medium. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 05 communication studies |
| Programme: | Communication Studies MSc (60713) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/97682 |
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