The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web

We make available data related to subreddit and standalone forums from the manosphere.

We also make available Perspective API annotations for all posts.

You can find the code in GitHub.

Please cite this paper if you use this data:

@article{ribeiroevolution2021, title={The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web}, author={Ribeiro, Manoel Horta and Blackburn, Jeremy and Bradlyn, Barry and De Cristofaro, Emiliano and Stringhini, Gianluca and Long, Summer and Greenberg, Stephanie and Zannettou, Savvas}, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'21)}}, year={2021} }

1. Reddit data

We make available data for forums and for relevant subreddits (56 of them, as described in subreddit_descriptions.csv). These are available, 1 line per post in each subreddit Reddit in /ndjson/reddit.ndjson. A sample for example is:

{ "author": "Handheld_Gaming", "date_post": 1546300852, "id_post": "abcusl", "number_post": 9.0, "subreddit": "Braincels", "text_post": "Its been 2019 for almost 1 hour And I am at a party with 120 people, half of them being foids. The last year had been the best in my life. I actually was happy living hope because I was redpilled to the death.

Now that I am blackpilled I see that I am the shortest of all men and that I am the only one with a recessed jaw.

Its over. Its only thanks to my age old friendship with chads and my social skills I had developed in the past year that a lot of men like me a lot as a friend.

No leg lengthening syrgery is gonna save me. Ignorance was a bliss. Its just horror now seeing that everyone can make out wirth some slin hoe at the party.

I actually feel so unbelivably bad for turbomanlets. Life as an unattractive manlet is a pain, I cant imagine the hell being an ugly turbomanlet is like. I would have roped instsntly if I were one. Its so unfair.

Tallcels are fakecels and they all can (and should) suck my cock.

If I were 17cm taller my life would be a heaven and I would be the happiest man alive.

Just cope and wait for affordable body tranpslants.", "thread": "t3_abcusl" }

1. Forums

We here describe the .sqlite and .ndjson files that contain the data from the following forums.

(avfm) --- https://d2ec906f9aea-003845.vbulletin.net (incels) --- https://incels.co/ (love_shy) --- http://love-shy.com/lsbb/ (redpilltalk) --- https://redpilltalk.com/ (mgtow) --- https://www.mgtow.com/forums/ (rooshv) --- https://www.rooshvforum.com/ (pua_forum) --- https://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/ (the_attraction) --- http://www.theattractionforums.com/

The files are in folders /sqlite/ and /ndjson.

2.1 .sqlite

All the tables in the sqlite. datasets follow a very simple {key:value} format. Each key is a thread name (for example /threads/housewife-is-like-a-job.123835/) and each value is a python dictionary or a list. This file contains three tables:

idx each key is the relative address to a thread and maps to a post. Each post is represented by a dict:

"type": (list) in some forums you can add a descriptor such as [RageFuel] to each topic, and you may also have special types of posts, like sticked/pool/locked posts.
"title": (str) title of the thread; "link": (str) link to the thread; "author_topic": (str) username that created the thread; "replies": (int) number of replies, may differ from number of posts due to difference in crawling date; "views": (int) number of views; "subforum": (str) name of the subforum; "collected": (bool) indicates if raw posts have been collected; "crawled_idx_at": (str) datetime of the collection.

processed_posts each key is the relative address to a thread and maps to a list with posts (in order). Each post is represented by a dict:

"author": (str) author's username; "resume_author": (str) author's little description; "joined_author": (str) date author joined; "messages_author": (int) number of messages the author has; "text_post": (str) text of the main post; "number_post": (int) number of the post in the thread; "id_post": (str) unique post identifier (depends), for sure unique within thread; "id_post_interaction": (list) list with other posts ids this post quoted; "date_post": (str) datetime of the post, "links": (tuple) nice tuple with the url parsed, e.g. ('https', 'www.youtube.com', '/S5t6K9iwcdw'); "thread": (str) same as key; "crawled_at": (str) datetime of the collection.

raw_posts each key is the relative address to a thread and maps to a list with unprocessed posts (in order). Each post is represented by a dict:

"post_raw": (binary) raw html binary; "crawled_at": (str) datetime of the collection.

2.2 .ndjson

Each line consists of a json object representing a different comment with the following fields:

"author": (str) author's username; "resume_author": (str) author's little description; "joined_author": (str) date author joined; "messages_author": (int) number of messages the author has; "text_post": (str) text of the main post; "number_post": (int) number of the post in the thread; "id_post": (str) unique post identifier (depends), for sure unique within thread; "id_post_interaction": (list) list with other posts ids this post quoted; "date_post": (str) datetime of the post, "links": (tuple) nice tuple with the url parsed, e.g. ('https', 'www.youtube.com', '/S5t6K9iwcdw'); "thread": (str) same as key; "crawled_at": (str) datetime of the collection.

1. Perspective

We also run each post and reddit post through perspective, the files are located in the /perspective/ folder. They are compressed with gzip. One example output

{ "id_post": 5200, "hate_output": { "text": "I still can\u2019t wrap my mind around both of those articles about these c~~~s sleeping with poor Haitian Men. Where\u2019s the uproar?, where the hell is the outcry?, the \u201cpig\u201d comments or the \u201ccreeper comments\u201d. F~~~ing hell, if roles were reversed and it was an article about Men going to Europe where under 18 sex in legal, you better believe they would crucify the writer of that article and DEMAND an apology by the paper that wrote it.. This is exactly what I try and explain to people about the double standards within our modern society. A bunch of older women, wanna get their kicks off by sleeping with poor Men, just before they either hit or are at menopause age. F~~~ing unreal, I\u2019ll never forget going to Sweden and Norway a few years ago with one of my buddies and his girlfriend who was from there, the legal age of consent in Norway is 16 and in Sweden it\u2019s 15. I couldn\u2019t believe it, but my friend told me \u201c hey, it\u2019s normal here\u201d . Not only that but the age wasn\u2019t a big different in other European countries as well. One thing i learned very quickly was how very Misandric Sweden as well as Denmark were.", "TOXICITY": 0.6079781, "SEVERE_TOXICITY": 0.53744453, "INFLAMMATORY": 0.7279288, "PROFANITY": 0.58842486, "INSULT": 0.5511079, "OBSCENE": 0.9830818, "SPAM": 0.17009115 } }

1. Working with sqlite

A nice way to read some of the files of the dataset is using SqliteDict, for example:

from sqlitedict import SqliteDict processed_posts = SqliteDict("./data/forums/incels.sqlite", tablename="processed_posts")

for key, posts in processed_posts.items(): for post in posts: # here you could do something with each post in the dataset pass

1. Helpers

Additionally, we provide two .sqlite files that are helpers used in the analyses. These are related to reddit, and not to the forums! They are:

channel_dict.sqlite a sqlite where each key corresponds to a subreddit and values are lists of dictionaries users who posted on it, along with timestamps.

author_dict.sqlite a sqlite where each key corresponds to an author and values are lists of dictionaries of the subreddits they posted on, along with timestamps.

These are used in the paper for the migration analyses.

1. Examples and particularities for forums

Although we did our best to clean the data and be consistent across forums, this is not always possible. In the following subsections we talk about the particularities of each forum, directions to improve the parsing which were not pursued as well as give some examples on how things work in each forum.

6.1 incels

Check out an archived version of the front page, the thread page and a post page, as well as a dump of the data stored for a thread page and a post page.

types: for the incel forums the special types associated with each thread in the idx table are “Sticky”, “Pool”, “Closed”, and the custom types added by users, such as [LifeFuel]. These last ones are all in brackets. You can see some examples of these in the on the example thread page.

quotes: quotes in this forum were quite nice and thus, all quotations are deterministic.

6.2 LoveShy

Check out an archived version of the front page, the thread page and a post page, as well as a dump of the data stored for a thread page and a post page.

types: no types were parsed. There are some rules in the forum, but not significant.

quotes: quotes were obtained from exact text+author match, or author match + a jaccard