“This forum is NOT A DEMOCRACY:”

The role of norms and moderation in creating incel identities

Abstract

Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) have recently gained notoriety for their aggressive, often violent, misogyny; yet incels were not always an anti-democratic 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 paper 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.