The sexist narrative on alternative social media dissected (TGTR-6)
Toxic language use on fringe social media platforms and image boards (4chan, 8kun, GAB, etc.) is being increasingly well-documented, with many studies describing the racist, nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric that are flooding these boards in particular. Yet, the sexist messages and ideology remain under the radar and several studies have pointed out that online hate against women is still oftentimes ignored and downplayed.
For this report, we collected more than 100.000 posts from online fringe media platforms (4plebs, 4chan and GAB) containing keywords referring to women. From this dataset we extracted 25.000 posts created in the month of February 2021, which all mentioned the neutral word ‘woman’. We chose to only screen for this one neutral word, instead of including sexist slurs, to prevent steering the analysis in a biased direction. On the basis of these 25.000 posts we attempted to map recurring sexist narratives on fringe media platforms using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.
- Elizabeth Cappon
