Equal opportunity sexism: Study finds online hatred of men and women looks similar

Summarised by Centrist

A new study covered by PsyPost suggests online communities built around hostility toward men and those built around hostility toward women may have more in common than many assume. 

Researcher Erica Coppolillo analysed four extremist Reddit communities and found “strikingly similar behaviours and language patterns” across both misandric and misogynistic spaces, suggesting gendered hate speech may be less about the target’s sex and more about the dynamics of toxic online echo chambers.

The study examined posts and comments from 2016 to 2022, focusing on two communities hostile to men and two hostile to women. After filtering for gender-specific terms, the researcher compared vocabulary, toxicity, emotional tone and network structure. 

According to the research, there were “no sharp linguistic boundaries” between the groups, and the most common words appeared at similar rates across all four communities. 

Toxicity scores also followed a similar pattern, with most content rated non-toxic but a smaller cluster in each group showing highly toxic material.

Emotion analysis found that hate was the most common feeling expressed across all four communities, with anger typically second. 

At a broad content level, the emotional patterns were similar, though the involuntary celibate group leaned slightly more toward sadness and the radical feminist group more toward fear. 

When the analysis shifted from posts to individual users, however, the study found that the mainstream feminist community showed the highest levels of user-driven hate, followed by the radical feminist group and the men’s rights group.

According to the study, communities targeting men did not organise themselves in fundamentally different ways from those targeting women. 

Read more over at PsyPost

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