Research Symposium

BIO

Hi, I’m Mason and I’m from Signal Mountain, Tennessee. I am majoring in Finance, and my goal is to work in real estate development. I wanted to research something that I was interested outside of my major, and I have always been interested in the law and learning how to improve and adapt it to the modern world.

Incels and Firearms

Abstract

The Incel movement is an underground movement that is primarily present on the internet. The community is connected through various platforms and other online forms of communication where they are free to discuss or vent about anything related to the ideology of the community. Throughout the past decade or so, as online platforms are becoming more common for places of discussion in privacy, there has been an increase in the amount of violent attacks from members of the incel community. It is proven in some cases, and suspected in many more that these online platforms were where the planning, or at least signs of the attack before they occurred, took place. This project aims to attempt to locate incel activity on various online platforms such Reddit, Twitch and Telegram and record how prevalent the community is on these sites. Other objectives of this project is attempting to identify the specific language used when communicating between members, and looking to see how often and the severity of how they interact with those outside of the community such as streamers. The research was carried out by using search terms to look for incel activity on various online platforms, and recording the language used for later data sorting.

Keywords: Incels, Firearms, violence, rape