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incels.is, formerly known as incels.co and incels.me, founded in 2017 by SergeantIncel and Lamarcus Small after the banning of r/incels.

It since gained notoriety for being the largest English-speaking incel internet forum, and became a main subject of academic literature treating the incel online subculture.

History

The site was originally created under the name incels.me on November 8, 2017, after the suspension of the subreddit r/incels, by a previous moderator of the subreddit with username SergeantIncel. The day the subreddit was banned, SergeantIncel and other former members communicated through Discord to migrate to a standalone site. According to a 2021 HCI study published in the Journal of the ACM, this moderation measure led to a decrease in newcomers, but an increase in previous users' activity within this community.

In 2018, it became known as incels.co after being suspended by the .me registrar.

As a result of its new URL being denied domain name renewal, it switched to the domain incels.is, belonging to the .is registrar, known from hosting previously-banned sites like The Pirate Bay. As of 2023, both URLs redirect to the same website.

As of 2019, the founder SergeantIncel and webmaster Lamarcus Small, also ran the suicide encouragement forum Sanctioned Suicide. They claim that their forums are intended as support communities.

In December 2021, New York Times investigative reporter Megan Twohey published a piece naming Small and SergeantIncel (online handle of Uruguayan national Diego Galante), as the founders of Sanctioned Suicide, incels.is and related forums. It described their network's connection to multiple real-world suicides. A year later, New York Times reported that Galante and Small claimed to have subsequently resigned from Sanctioned Suicide.

As of 2022, according to The Washington Post, Small is running multiple manosphere-related websites that direct people to this forum.

In 2023, Rolling Stone described site backlash due to an increase in members, including a moderator "komesarj", leaving the site after not identifying as incel anymore.

Site characteristics

The website is a primary gathering place for incels.

It is composed of public and registered message boards for self-described incels to discuss their personal experiences. Users may tag their forum posts with specific incel vocabulary.

The author Talia Lavin in her book Culture Warlords describes the site's culture as one of "one-upmanship", "barroom boast-off" and shock content. Rolling Stone describes a vindictive site culture after an ex-moderator entered a romantic relationship, and was subsequently rejected by site members as a "fake incel". Although site members justify the site's content as ironic, a prominent spokesperson Jack Richard Peterson claims to have left the site due to its exaggerated racist and misogynistic rhetoric.

According to a 2023 longitudinal study, site members join the website with pre-existing misogynistic behavior, instead of developing it over time.

According Vox, the site has a culture of praising mass killers, which is treated lightly by the site's admins. They describe a site member's username as praising Marc Lépine, a Canadian mass killer.

To hide the forum from stranger view, users have the option to mask its appearance as a "banana marketing website".

The site owners also operate the wiki incels.wiki, which is described as cherrypicking academic papers to promote misogynistic points.

Rules

Registration is approval-based. As of 2021, the site requires users to use their home Wi-Fi to register.

The moderators ban women and LGBT individuals from joining, justifying so by stating that the forum is oriented towards straight men.

Demographics

Despite common stereotypes of incels as young white men, according to the website 40% of its users are of an ethnic minority background.

According to a 2019 website poll, one in four members were on the autism spectrum, and two thirds considered suicide.

Public image

Both of the website's public and hidden content are characterized by hate speech and trolling, like glorification of mass shootings.

Due its moderation and content, the site has migrated between different TLDs.

In 2018, it was suspended by a .me registrar due to potential connections with the 2018 Toronto van attack.

In 2021, New York Times connected the site and its operators to the suicide encouragement site Sanctioned Suicide.

Notable members

• Jack Peterson, media personality.
• Nathan Larson, American politician and white supremacist.

See also

• Misogynist terrorism
• Online community
• patriots.win – another standalone website founded in response to the banning of a subreddit.

References

1. ^ Zimmerman, Shannon (2022-10-26). "The Ideology of Incels: Misogyny and Victimhood as Justification for Political Violence". Terrorism and Political Violence. Retrieved 2023-06-09.
2. ^ Horta Ribeiro, Manoel; Jhaver, Shagun; Zannettou, Savvas; Blackburn, Jeremy; Stringhini, Gianluca; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; West, Robert (2021-10-18). "Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 5 (CSCW2): 316:1–316:24. doi:10.1145/3476057. S2CID 224803187.
3. ^ Lorenz, Taylor. "The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-06-09.
4. ^ Beauchamp, Zack (2019-04-16). "The rise of incels: How a support group for the dateless became a violent internet subculture". Vox. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
5. ^ Halpin, Michael (2023-06-06). "Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men". New Media & Society. Retrieved 2023-06-09.
6. ^ Binder, Matt (2018-11-20). "Incels.me, a major hub for hate speech and misogyny, suspended by .ME registry". Mashable. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
7. "Incels.is - Involuntary Celibates". Retrieved 2023-06-09.
8. ^ Nashrulla, Tasneem (6 June 2019). "Incels Are Running An Online Suicide Forum That Was Blamed For A Young Woman's Death". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 2023-05-03.
9. Love, Shayla (November 19, 2020). "People Are Dying After Joining a 'Pro-Choice' Suicide Forum. How Much Is the Site to Blame?". Vice. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
10. ^ Twohey, Megan; Dance, Gabriel J.X. (December 9, 2021). "Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 14, 2023. Retrieved June 9, 2023.
11. Dance, Gabriel J. X.; Twohey, Megan (2022-11-02). "Bill Outlawing Online Suicide Assistance Would Open Sites to Liability". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-02-15. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
12. ^ Klee, Miles (2023-04-27). "The 'LeBron James of Incels' Swears He Has a Girlfriend Now -- He Just Can't Prove It". Rolling Stone. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
13. Ling, Justin (June 2, 2020). "Incels Are Radicalized and Dangerous. But Are They Terrorists?". Foreign Policy. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
14. ^ Lavin, Talia (2020-10-13). Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. Hachette Books. ISBN 978-0-30684-643-4.
15. ^ Ling, Justin (2018-06-19). "'Not as ironic as I imagined': the incels spokesman on why he is renouncing them". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-05-03.
16. Percich, Alison (2021). Supreme agentlemen or Radicalized Killers: Analyzing the Radicalization Paths of Involuntary Celibate Killers and the Role of the Online Incel Forums (Masters thesis). Georgetown University.
17. Jaki, Sylvia; Smedt, Tom De; Gwóźdź, Maja; Panchal, Rudresh; Rossa, Alexander; Pauw, Guy De (2019-11-25). "Online hatred of women in the Incels.me forum: Linguistic analysis and automatic detection". Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. 7 (2): 240–268. doi:10.1075/jlac.00026.jak. ISSN 2213-1272. S2CID 199183681.
18. "Hitting the Books: The racist underpinnings of incel ideology". Engadget. Retrieved 2023-05-02.
19. "Radical online communities and their toxic allure for autistic men". Spectrum | Autism Research News. 2020-05-13. Retrieved 2023-05-02.
20. ""I laugh at the death of normies": How incels are celebrating the Toronto mass killing". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 2023-05-02.
21. Ling, Justin (2018-06-19). "'Not as ironic as I imagined': the incels spokesman on why he is renouncing them". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-05-03.
22. "'Nathan Larson, the self-described incel paedophile, is running for Congress. This is how he groomed vulnerable young men'". The Independent. 2018-06-05. Retrieved 2023-05-03.

• Internet properties established in 2017
• Internet-related controversies
• Internet ethics
• Virtual communities
• Incel-related violence
• Websites