The Mainstream Pill

Horrifying as these conversations are, they’re not an anomaly for the misogynist incel movement, which is defined by a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, justification of violence against them,^[3] and reverence for both self-proclaimed incel men and other misogynist killers who perpetrate mass violence as “saints” and “heroes.”^[4] Within these forums, conversations about murdered women and girls are a regular topic, usually framed as violence women brought on themselves for choosing “the wrong guy.” Meanwhile, the women’s killers are celebrated for “sav[ing] many men the trouble” and preventing “decades of thotdom” (a reference to the misogynist online slur “thot,” or “that ho over there”). 

But what was more unusual is that several months before Devins’ brutal murder became fodder for the incel commenters, the forum’s founder and administrator, who uses the pseudonym Alexander Ash,^[5] penned an appeal for greater public understanding of what he said was a frequently misunderstood community.^[6] In his essay, “Incels,” published in February 2019, Ash argues that inceldom is neither a movement nor a political subculture but merely “a [life] situation,” and sets out to create an “objective” and “realistic portrayal” of incels by addressing what he perceives as the “often sensationalist overtones” in media coverage of incels. He tries to distance incels from the violent and misogynistic ideology its most prominent members have expressed. And he attempts to absolve the community of any connection to “incel criminals,” like the perpetrators of mass casualty attacks that took place in 2014 in Santa Barbara and in 2018 in Toronto, which together left 16 people dead. He did this by misrepresenting the perpetrators’ involvement in online incel spaces prior to their attacks, suggesting mental health or autism diagnoses were the main root of their violence, and arguing that at least one of them “wouldn’t be considered unattractive by most standards,” as though to suggest he couldn’t be a real incel after all.

And yet just this July, an Ohio man who appears to have been an active member of Ash’s forum was charged with a federal hate crime for plotting to carry out a mass shooting targeting women. On July 21, a 21-year-old man in Ohio was charged with a federal hate crime for an attempted mass shooting of women. From July 2019 through his arrest in the spring of 2020, the would-be attacker had been “a frequent poster” on “a popular incel website,” according to a statement from the Department of Justice.^[7] The day the hate crime charges were announced, people on Ash’s forum identified the would-be attacker as a fellow member, matching descriptions of his posts in the indictment with those posted on the site. The posts in question detailed the attempted attacker emulating actions of the Santa Barbara attacker prior to his 2014 attack, including spraying women and couples with orange juice through a water gun. And like the Santa Barbara attacker, the thwarted attacker also seemed intent on targeting sororities.^[8]

Ash’s essay, with all its misrepresentations, was one of the first of several recent attempts to rebrand the misogynist incel movement and present a more palatable version of their online forums, where—as ample documentation has shown—dehumanizing misogyny and glorification of violence are the norm.^[9] In this new narrative, incels aren’t violent misogynists so much as misunderstood, lonely men being persecuted because of their lack of sexual contact with women. The hateful rhetoric they’ve become known for online is recast as just “controversial”^[10] “locker room talk,”^[11] as Ash argued in a recent public panel (echoing, not so incidentally, the justification used by former President Donald Trump to excuse his own clear misogyny).

That a movement best known for promoting violence against women wants to overhaul its image is unsurprising. But recently, incels’ attempts to reframe their identity have also been helped along by researchers, journalists, and “counter-violent extremism” experts, who, in their attempts to investigate and understand incels, have given them larger, more mainstream platforms. These new platforms have allowed incels to reframe the public narrative about them; minimize the threat their community poses; and have amplified—or even endorsed—their hate-laced grievances, centering their self-perceived victimhood at the hands of women who deny them sex.

Today’s misogynist incels are a radical evolution of where the term and community came from 24 years ago, when a bisexual Canadian woman named Alana created an online mailing list and website to serve as a peer-support network for people who “had difficulty starting relationships or finding partners.”^[12] In the early 2000s, “involuntary celibate” was used as an academic survey term, but the name “incel” was coined on Alana’s forum and quickly adapted as a self-identity. Unlike contemporary misogynist incel forums—which only allow cis-gender heterosexual men to join,^[13] and are united in their adherence to a male supremacist ideology^[14]—early incel and shyness forums such as Alana’s welcomed both men and women, and people of varied sexual orientations and histories. On these early forums, being an incel was not presented as a permanent, unchangeable identity, but rather a situation that could be experienced by anyone. Although they were not devoid of negativity, they offered emotional support, and according to a former member, also “dating advice and coping strategies.”^[15] The fatalistic and misogynist sensibility that defines incel spaces today was kept in check by attentive moderators.^[16]

But over time, some incel forums became increasingly toxic and insular. Members banned from highly moderated forums for sharing misogynistic content flocked to forums where it was allowed.^[17] Those forums then started to change, becoming, as a 2020 study found, “increasingly militant and hostile to women, expressing offensive biologically deterministic memes and openly advocating violence.”^[18] Today, the most prominent incel forums are defined more by shared misogyny than by celibacy, allowing as members men who don’t fit any definition of “incel” but who do echo the forums’ virulent misogyny. Eventually, the forums that had emphasized support and moderation dissolved, leaving only the increasingly militant misogynist forums, which then, according to Vox journalist Zack Beauchamp, “cross-pollinated with members of other, similar online subcultures.”^[19]  

One of them was the “anti-PUA” community, composed of men angry that the dating and seduction techniques suggested by so-called pick-up artists—a booming online industry in the mid-2000s that gave men dubious advice on how to “pick up” women^[20]—had failed to get them either girlfriends or sex.^[21] Although anti-PUA communities, like the PUAHate forum, claimed to hate PUA gurus and their advice, they shared a common perspective on women—as a target or prize^[22] that some men could win while others were denied.

In May 2014, a member of PUAHate, who identified as an incel on the forum, killed six people and injured 14 more before killing himself in Santa Barbara, California. The perpetrator left behind a manifesto and several YouTube videos describing his hatred of women he thought should be attracted to him and his desire to seek revenge.^[23] (Specifically, the perpetrator fixated on White, blonde sorority women, reflecting the broader incel movement’s emphasis on gaining sexual access to attractive White women.) In short order, the manifesto and videos became an inspiration to incels,^[24] and the perpetrator became a martyr celebrated on new forums that were popping up across the web—on Reddit, 4chan, and elsewhere. It was also around this time that a new facet of misogynist incel ideology, the black pill, began to take form.

From Red Pill to Black

Since the early 2000s male supremacist movements, namely pick-up artists, Men Going Their Own Way, men’s rights activists, and members of the r/TheRedPill subreddit,^[25] have embraced what they call the “red pill.” The term—now ubiquitous across the Far Right—comes from the 1999 film The Matrix, where the protagonist Neo is given the choice to take a blue pill or a red pill, representing the decision to remain in a comfortable illusion or confront the hidden reality of how the world truly operates. Today far-right groups use the term to describe how they learned and accepted their various ideologies. For White supremacists and the Alt Right, the red pill denotes accepting a variety of beliefs, ranging from White genocide and Great Replacement theory to antisemitic conspiracism and fears of the New World Order.^[26] The core red pill for male supremacists is the belief that men do not, in fact, hold systemic power and privilege in the world, but rather they are socially, economically, and sexually at the mercy of women’s power and desires. And the architects of this oppression are feminists, whose advocacy for gender equality has led to men becoming the sole victims of sexist discrimination.^[27]

The red pill also awakens men to the notion that they exist within a “sexual marketplace” where everyone has a “sexual market value” determined by various characteristics, from physical features and status to their wealth and charm. And within this marketplace, argue members of the “manosphere”—an online network of male supremacist groups—women always seek out men who have a higher sexual market value than their own. This concept, often referred to as “female hypergamy,” was popularized among the manosphere by White supremacist and men’s right activist Roger Devlin in his 2006 essay “Sexual Utopia in Power.”^[28] Devlin argues that hypergamy “is an irrational instinct” that “implies the rejection of most males”; that the feminist-driven “sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own utopia”; and that this utopia is a consequence of women’s “natural” hypergamous instinct. Marriage, Devlin asserts, is a way to “[channel] female hypergamy in a socially useful way” as “sex is too important a matter to be left to the independent judgment of young women, because young women rarely possess good judgment.” “Heterosexual monogamy,” he argues, “is incompatible with equality of the sexes” and therefore a “husband’s leadership” is “necessary to accommodate female hypergamy.”

Within the worldview of the red pill, some adherents feel they must increase their marketplace “value”—a desire pick-up artists responded to with books and tutorials on strategies for “picking-up” women or becoming the kind of man they believe women want. But some red pill adherents, like members of PUAHate, came to distrust these promises as a “blue pill” illusion, and argue that there exist no individual strategies that can help them improve enough to have sexual relationships with the women they desire. Rather they began to believe that their personal issues were systemic, and so women’s “hypergamous nature,” and the society that supports it, must be addressed systemically—either through the reinstitution of social norms that limit women’s choices, or through mass violence and suicide. ^[29]

These ideas became the cornerstone of the “black pill” ideology: a term that seems to have been coined by anti-feminist bloggers in the early 2010s to describe incels’ fatalistic embrace of a biological determinism^[30] under which they are destined to always remain alone, and wherein their isolation and lack of access to women renders them—in their own words—“subhuman.” Since blackpillers believe women choose sexual partners based almost solely on physical characteristics, they also believe that means some men are doomed by their genetically predetermined looks to never find a mate. Under this philosophy, incels are seen as intensely victimized—by women, by society at large, and particularly by feminism, since they blame women’s increased agency for their situation.^[31] And what follows from this sense of victimhood is an escalation of the misogyny common among most incels, graduating from considering women targets or rewards to dehumanizing and glorifying violence against them.^[32]

Accepting the black pill leaves incels with limited options on how to proceed. While some still aim for “ascension”—the movement term for leaving inceldom by having sex with a woman—it has many caveats and is rarely viewed as a realistic possibility. Therefore, most argue they can either resign themselves to their fate—which, for many, leads to a suicidal ideation that is sometimes encouraged by fellow forum members^[33]—or they can try to change society, through policy or violence. In some cases, forum members who express suicidal ideation are encouraged to commit mass murder before they kill themselves, emulating perpetrators of other incel massacres^[34] and thus drawing attention to incels’ plight.^[35] Others advocate for changes to the legal system, ranging from re-establishing “patriarchy,” to removing women’s rights, or compulsory monogamy and “state-issued girlfriends.”^[36]

These solutions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to normalizing violence against women. Self-identified incels who have committed mass murder, other mass murderers, and violence against women are regularly memorialized or celebrated in the forums. Dehumanization of women is so deeply embedded in misogynist incel communities that women are frequently referred to with both animalistic slurs—such as beasts, holes, or roastie—and mechanistic^[37] ones, like femoid or foid (which are abbreviations for “Female Humanoid Organism”).^[38]  

Reframing Misogyny

Over the last two years, incels have tried to reframe and normalize their beliefs by disavowing—on blogs, wikis,^[39] and articles—the most obvious or overt expressions of misogyny and emphasizing the heterogeneity of their members. Part of the reframing involves casting inceldom as a “situation,” rather than a movement or subculture, which is shared by many, whether or not they claim the incel label.^[40] But this effort to rhetorically draw the movement under a larger, more mainstream tent is at odds with how the community identifies and regulates itself. While the largest incel forum, where Ash is the administrator, officially defines incels as any “Person who desires a romantic relationship but is unable to enter one,”^[41] in reality forum members are frequently challenged about their legitimacy as incels. Until sometime in late 2018 the forum granted “conditional” membership to people who weren’t incels but who did express a “blackpilled mentality,”^[42] suggesting that the acceptance of a political ideology, and not one’s relationship status, was the actual uniting factor for membership. Further, members who post content that doesn’t align with the black pill are often labeled “LARPers,” fakecels, noncels, or volcels (voluntary celibates). And while content that expresses “blue pill” ideology is no longer explicitly banned from the forum,^[43] members seen as offering “blue pill” advice—such as “take a shower,” “work on your personality,” or “don’t be misogynist”—are still likely to be banned or ostracized by other members.

While both Ash’s essay and the incels wiki note that some women identify as incels, or “femcels,” most forum members don’t accept them,^[44] and women are barred from most incel forums, including Ash’s. For the most part, femcels are only acknowledged insofar as they can serve as a defense against accusations of misogyny.^[45]

And while leaders like Ash have tried to publicly distance themselves from overtly misogynistic rhetoric—even as their forums remain as misogynistic as ever—the core arguments remain the same. In Ash’s case, his “Incels” essay still blames “social behavior” like “hypergamy” and feminism for “oppress[ing]” and “disadvantaging men.”^[46] It may come with fewer explicit threats, but the misogyny of these arguments and terminology is so deeply rooted that it can only be understood as a fundamental feature of incels and other male supremacist identities. 

A Friendly Ear

In 2018, a man drove a rented van into a crowd of people in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16 others. Shortly before his attack, the perpetrator posted on Facebook that the “Incel Rebellion has already begun,” paying homage to the Santa Barbara perpetrator in his post. After the attack, The New York Times published an article by Ross Douthat titled “The Redistribution of Sex,” arguing that “recent Western history” teaches us that “sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.” In this case, the extremists and radicals Douthat meant were incels, and he used the massacre as a springboard to consider a question subsequently posed by economist Robin Hanson: “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?”^[47] Douthat ultimately concluded that society may soon “address the unhappiness of incels” through the “logic of commerce and technology,” likely in the form of sex workers or robots. But Douthat completely failed to recognize or challenge the misogynist rhetoric underlying Hanson’s question, and instead he helped legitimize some of the “solutions” incels suggest. As several published critiques of the article pointed out, Douthat ignored the impact a “redistribution of sex” would have on women,^[48] and equated incels with marginalized groups instead of addressing the violent misogyny they have unleashed.^[49]

More recently, incels have been given several direct platforms, allowing them to reframe their image as unhappy but not hateful.

In August 2019, The New York Times named a new podcast, “The Incel Project” (often shorted to just “Incel”), as one of its summer recommendations.^[50] The show’s host, Naama Kates, presents her podcast as a journey of empathy and listening, giving incels “a chance to tell their own story in their own words,” as she put it in a 2020 video from the “counter-violent extremism” organization Light Upon Light. She hypothesizes that doing so might impact the incel community “by making them realize that the outsiders, the normies, the listeners would actually be open to engaging in an empathetic dialogue with them.”^[51] And, as she hopefully notes in the podcast’s first episode, “when people feel heard, they stop hating.”^[52]  

But giving a platform to people who participate in a bigoted and misogynistic community also risks validating that rhetoric and spreading it to new audiences, particularly given the podcast’s format, wherein Kates rarely pushes back or challenges the beliefs of the incel forum members she interviews.^[53] While Kates sometimes voices her disagreement, she rarely offers a different perspective or fact checks her guests as they describe themselves, their beliefs, and communities in palatable, whitewashed terms. In an episode where Kates addresses criticism that she is platforming and legitimizing a violent male supremacist community, she asserts that she is a “free-speech person” who doesn’t “believe that censorship works as well as compassion, and listening and engagement.”^[54]

In this regard, Kates seems to have recapitulated a now-common pattern in initially defending racist, misogynist, or other bigoted speech out of professed concern about censorship, but in time, repeating and spreading that speech herself. On both her own and the podcast’s Twitter accounts, she has occasionally shared tweets from the largest incel forums^[55] as well as blog posts that promote black pill ideology.^[56] In 2020, she contributed an article to the incel blog “The Misogynist Spectrum,”^[57] in which she downplays the dehumanizing terms that incels call women, namely “femoid” or “foid.”^[58] Specifically, she tries to reframe the terms’ meaning, claiming they are “not an indictment of women themselves, but rather of these women, these cheap imitations, these imposters, that look and act like the real deal but lack any soul or humanity.”  She identifies these “femoids” as “Modern women, the women that reject and object, that taunt and betray, that exploit both the beta males and their own sexuality for profit.” And she goes on to compare such “femoids” with what she calls “actual women,” whom she says “represent something good or at least neutral” for incels in that they are “coveted, as is actual intimacy.”

Incels’ use of the term “femoid,” and Kates’ interpretation of the term as applying only to “imposter” women without “soul[s] or humanity,” is textbook dehumanization, and such a categorization can have dangerous consequences. The Dangerous Speech Project, a U.S. organization that monitors the effects of violent and bigoted rhetoric, explains that language casting people as subhuman is not metaphorical or harmless,^[59] but rather is often a preparatory step to condition audiences “to condone or commit violence, by making their targets’ death and suffering seem less significant.” That’s exactly how it’s used by incels, as terms like “femoid” and “foid” are commonly interspersed with celebrations of violence against women on incel forums: “Thot Status: Patrolled. Rest in shit, foid.”

Shocking as it is for Kates to justify incels’ dehumanizing rhetoric, she also seems to defend black pill ideology as being, “like most philosophy, a broad critique of modern society.” In April, she even described a woman interviewee, confoundingly, as a “fellow femoid blackpill-adjacent content creator.”^[60]

While Kates began her podcast claiming she was just trying to hold the door open for incels to rejoin society—arguing that an empathetic ear could defuse incels’ combustible rage—it increasingly seems that Kates has instead walked through that door herself, no longer just reporting on incels’ misogyny, but justifying and sharing it with the world.

An Academic Welcome

In 2021, incels’ quest for mainstream representation received another boost from the International Center for Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE), a Washington, D.C.-based research center known for providing research, training, and counsel to government and intelligence leaders around the world^.[61] The group, founded in 2015, has another center in Brussels, partially funded by the European Union,^[62] which has focused on ISIS, “militant jihadis,” and more recently on “those considered domestic extremists.” In January 2021, ICSVE’s Washington branch hosted a panel with Jeff Schoep, a purportedly former neonazi^[63] currently being sued over his involvement in the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017.^[64] This year, ICSVE also began to focus on incels, hosting a panel discussion this January and publishing five reports on the movement since January.^[**]

The first of ICSVE’s two full-length “research reports” was published on January 21 and focuses on how or whether Covid-19 quarantine measures and the Canadian government’s terrorism charges against a man allegedly inspired by “incel ideology” had increased incels’ isolation and resentment. The second report, released on February 3, was titled, “Involuntary Celibates’ Experiences of and Grievance over Sexual Exclusion and the Potential Threat of Violence Among Those Active in an Online Incel Forum.” Both reports use survey data procured from Ash’s forum. The group also published three shorter “brief reports” on the movement, which were cross-published by the national security website Homeland Security Today.  

One obvious problem with this scholarly work though is that Ash is listed as a co-author on four of the five reports and Naama Kates is similarly credited on three.^[65] Though Ash’s role in writing the reports is unclear, it’s concerning to have the administrator of an incel forum be listed as a co-author. While previous ICSVE reports have drawn from primary data, including interviews and surveys with members of the community being studied, this seems to be the first time—at ICSVE or in academic research more broadly—that someone actively involved in a community that regularly expresses bigoted or violent ideology has co-authored the resulting study.

While ICSVE and the similar “counter-violent extremism” group Light Upon Light seem to be the first two organizations to actively include someone still involved in communities organized around bigotry or promotion of violence, some past reporting and research^[66] on incels has expressed sympathy for their supposed plight and offered solutions to addressing incel violence that do not fully consider the misogynist beliefs that bind the misogynist incel movement together.

But these aren’t the only concerns. In one of ICSVE’s brief reports, the authors argue that “incels seek understanding; they are willing to engage and interact with nonjudgmental researchers, they are willing to convey their grievances to broader society and most importantly they feel the threat of terrorist violence coming from their community is exaggerated.” A few things about this depart from normal social science practices: the sympathy extended to incels who don’t want to be judged; the presumption that incels publicly conveying misogynistic grievances is a productive endeavor; and allowing incels to assess whether concerns about violence from their community are warranted. In terms of the last point,^[67] it doesn’t seem that ICSVE researchers usually ask groups they are studying whether they agree with public concern over the threat they may pose,^[68] which begs the question: Why are incels seen as an exception?

On January 27, ICSVE hosted a Zoom panel discussion to launch the first report, with Ash and Kates as panelists and more than 200 people from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia registered. It seems to be the first time that ICSVE has included a panelist still actively involved in the community under study.      

In his comments, Ash spoke about supposed “misconceptions”^[69] about incels, mirroring the claims he made in his 2019 “Incels” essay. But this time his arguments were made to a public audience, and backed up by other panelists. One panelist affirmed Ash’s framing of the community as a life “situation” not a movement by arguing that, compared to other violent groups, “the most fundamental difference that we have found is that for incels it’s a circumstance, and as the name says it, it is an involuntary state of being.”^[70] But this claim fails to accurately portray the group ICSVE had actually studied: not anyone who is temporarily celibate, but rather people who chose to join and associate themselves with misogynist incel forums.

The panel also addressed incel forums’ misogyny and glorification of violence as another “misconception”—or what Ash framed as “locker room talk”^[71] and “venting.”^[72] Kates agreed, claiming that when “incels sort of worship or celebrate the mass killers or… incel killers…usually that stuff is said in irony or just venting.”^[73] The initial research report from ICSVE takes this argument one step further by suggesting such “venting” might serve a positive purpose, by deterring individuals from committing violence. The authors posit that if the 2018 Toronto perpetrator had “engaged in incel discussions online, as opposed to passively reading them, he may have found the interactions to be a kind of venting and the community a psychosocial support that prevented his turn to terrorism.”^[74]

But there’s no reason to believe those arguments are accurate. First, it’s unlikely that misogynist incel forums, where members encourage other people to commit suicide, can really be seen as a form of psychosocial support. Although incels might call the forums a “second…or even a first home,” as Ash put it,^[75] that doesn’t mean they aren’t violent and radicalizing spaces. Similar language has been used by White supremacists to describe their online forums,^[76] but we don’t call those support groups. Second, as studies of the rise of the Alt Right made clear, irony has been deftly used by far-right groups to spread and normalize bigoted views; far from negating potential harm, it has often served as a recruitment tool.^[77] Third, this “venting” and irony framework echoes incels’ existing efforts to distance themselves from accusations of promoting violence and misogyny, and so in platforming this rebranding effort, it also helps normalize the dehumanization of women.

But perhaps most concerning is the threat that this sort of “venting” can easily lead to far more concrete action. In 2021, a report from the Dangerous Speech Project found that dehumanization is a “hallmark” of speech that can “increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.”^[78] Dehumanizing rhetoric is widely recognized as a necessary precursor to genocide. Notably, in his manifesto, the Santa Barbara perpetrator called for all women to be put in concentration camps where “the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death.”

Dehumanizing language might also be understood as what sociologist Pete Simi and co-author criminologist Steven Windisch call “violent talk.”^[79] While sometimes, they note, such “violent talk” can be a substitute for “overt acts of violence,”^[80] other times, it’s the spark. Violent talk, they write, can “reinforce the value of violence,”^[81] leading to a threshold wherein “people no longer feel satisfied and begin to redefine venting as ‘inaction’ or not enough action.”^[82]

Exactly that sentiment is clear in the manifesto of the 2014 Santa Barbara mass killer. In a section about fellow members of the forum PUAHate, he writes, “many of them share my hatred of women, though unlike me they would be too cowardly to act on it.”^[83]

The Problem with Platforming

In his 2019 essay, Alexander Ash set out to reframe misogynist incels as misunderstood men venting online. Clearly, his efforts weren’t in vain, as the examples above show, of mainstream figures supporting this rebranding, and helping an active member of a misogynist community re-center incels’ narrative of male victimhood.

It’s hard to imagine the editor of the Daily Stormer sitting on a panel alongside researchers on far-right White supremacy. So why was it done here? Is this an example of what philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy”^[84]—situations where men’s feelings are centered even after they have perpetrated violence or harm? Self-identified incels have surely caused harm, and not just mass violence, but also revenge porn,^[85] cyberstalking,^[86] and harassment.^[87] While incels’ numbers may be limited, their misogyny and the violence they have committed is not exceptional. It’s simply not possible to separate incels from the wider spectrum of misogyny, which can be witnessed in femicide, rape, domestic violence, and other violence against women.

Providing incels a platform amplifies the narratives they want heard, spreading the message of male victimhood, obscuring that narrative’s foundation in male sexual entitlement and misogyny, and erasing the very real violence and dehumanization women suffer because of incels’ ideology.^[88] As a landmark study in 2020 found, comments that affirm this “feeling of ‘victimhood’ or persecution among men not only undermine any political action on gendered violence, they actually encourage those who feel ‘persecuted’ towards violence.”^[89]

While it’s important to understand bigoted and violent ideologies, especially those that have led to violence, it’s also important to consider how that’s done. Mass media and researchers can play a critical role in whether and how far-right groups and other violent or bigoted actors spread their message.^[90] As Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Project, has pointed out, when journalists cover White supremacists and other violent or bigoted actors, it’s critical to avoid allowing them to “use their own terms to describe themselves,” as doing so can aid in the “soften[ing]” or “re-branding”^[91] of these movements. In some cases, research has shown,^[92] it’s helpful to include the insights of current and former members of these groups, in order to have a full understanding of how the ideology and group dynamics function.

But that’s a far cry from simply handing people involved in bigoted and violent ideologies a megaphone, so their voices can travel farther.