The number of visits to hate-filled “incel” forums, where users discuss raping women, has increased more than sixfold in nine months, data shows.
Since March, UK web traffic to three of the largest incel — meaning involuntary celibate — websites has grown from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,505 in November, web traffic analysis by The Times and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has shown.
Users on the sites hailed Jake Davison, who shot dead five people and himself in Plymouth last year, as a hero and called for “all women to be raped at least once”.
The most extreme of the three sites, incels.is, saw a spike in traffic after the Plymouth shooting in August, rising from 200,000 visits in July to 280,000 in September. Davison frequently referenced incel terminology in YouTube videos and had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief” days before the mass killing.
Two of the three sites are run by Alexander Ash, a shadowy figure who has previously contributed to academic papers on the topic of incels.
Anne Speckhard, director of the International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism, who collaborated with Ash on a research paper, said she later regretted it, having not realised how extreme some of the material on the forums was.
Ash declined to comment.
The term incel refers to those who feel aggrieved by their inability to form sexual relationships with women. Initially a diverse movement, it has coalesced around internet forums, where men relate tales of sexual failure and vent their fury against women. In recent months, incels have delighted in the spate of women being spiked with needles while out at nightclubs.
Incel forums operate at the discretion of the site’s hosting company, unless the government has decided to intervene.
The DNS [Domain Name System] server provider for the incels.is site is Cloudflare, an American web company that has previously been criticised for not banning websites with hate speech content. The company has provided services to at least seven terrorist organisations, including Al-Shabaab, according to the Huffington Post.
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH, said that up to this point incels had largely been treated as an eccentric internet subculture, but called on tech companies to do more in recognising and removing hateful content. He said: “Make no mistake, incel communities are bound together by an ideology which preaches hatred of women, and has inspired deadly real-world attacks. The web-hosting services and other companies who are enabling incels need to stop doing business with disgusting hate groups — or regulators, law enforcement and legislators must and will step in to protect the public.”
Jonathan Hall, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said it was not yet possible to say whether hateful incel content could be deemed terrorism.
“There is a great deal of discussion about the use of violence in the incel world,” he said. “What’s hard for the authorities is knowing if and when this talk may result in real-world violence. If there’s a run of terrorism convictions relating to the incel ideology, it will be easier to conclude that some incel propaganda is illegal terrorist content.”
The draft Online Safety Bill will put a duty on service providers to restrict “illegal content” and leaves it up to service providers to decide what content it would, and would not, be a terrorism offence to disseminate.
Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN initiative working with the global tech industry, said the bill was not nearly radical enough. “It strikes us as absurd that the Online Safety Bill proposes to make executives at tech companies criminally responsible but not to make users who post that content criminally responsible for doing so,” he said.
Cloudflare did not respond to a request for comment.
Many users expressed admiration. Writing a day after the shooting, one user posted on the site incels.is: “What a hero I hope he is in heaven [right now].”
Another user wrote on the same site: “A new hero has risen.” A third said: “One of us! One of us!”
Similar posts were made on other incel websites. On looksmax.org, which describes itself as “a community dedicated to . . . the art of improving your appearance”, one user wrote: “Poor Jake, I wish he was still with us.” Other users questioned why Davison did not shoot more “Stacies”, the term used to refer to women whom incels view as sexually unattainable.
One user wrote in response: “Because he was low IQ. If he was a high IQ incel he would have shot up a feminist rally or joined a feminist community and taken their addresses.”
Davison, 22, below, killed his mother, Maxine Davison, 51, Lee Martyn, 43, and his three-year-old daughter Sophie, Stephen Washington, 59, who was walking his dog and Kate Shepherd, 66.
In a series of online video messages Davison described himself as an incel, a reference to the movement of “involuntary celibate” young men who blame women for their sexual failings. Davison, who was autistic, spoke about mass shootings, lamented his virginity and said women had low IQs.
After the shooting, Davison was frequently likened to Elliot Rodger on incel forums. In 2014 Rodger stabbed to death three fellow students in California and shot another three before killing himself.
Rodger left a 137-page “manifesto” and a YouTube video revealing that he carried out the attack because of his hatred for people in relationships. Forum users hailed Davison as “a new ER”.
However, counter-terrorism officers exploring Davison’s motivation ruled out incel beliefs, saying they were not behind the attack.
www.thetimes.co.uk
Since March, UK web traffic to three of the largest incel — meaning involuntary celibate — websites has grown from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,505 in November, web traffic analysis by The Times and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has shown.
Users on the sites hailed Jake Davison, who shot dead five people and himself in Plymouth last year, as a hero and called for “all women to be raped at least once”.
The most extreme of the three sites, incels.is, saw a spike in traffic after the Plymouth shooting in August, rising from 200,000 visits in July to 280,000 in September. Davison frequently referenced incel terminology in YouTube videos and had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief” days before the mass killing.
Two of the three sites are run by Alexander Ash, a shadowy figure who has previously contributed to academic papers on the topic of incels.
Anne Speckhard, director of the International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism, who collaborated with Ash on a research paper, said she later regretted it, having not realised how extreme some of the material on the forums was.
Ash declined to comment.
The term incel refers to those who feel aggrieved by their inability to form sexual relationships with women. Initially a diverse movement, it has coalesced around internet forums, where men relate tales of sexual failure and vent their fury against women. In recent months, incels have delighted in the spate of women being spiked with needles while out at nightclubs.
Incel forums operate at the discretion of the site’s hosting company, unless the government has decided to intervene.
The DNS [Domain Name System] server provider for the incels.is site is Cloudflare, an American web company that has previously been criticised for not banning websites with hate speech content. The company has provided services to at least seven terrorist organisations, including Al-Shabaab, according to the Huffington Post.
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH, said that up to this point incels had largely been treated as an eccentric internet subculture, but called on tech companies to do more in recognising and removing hateful content. He said: “Make no mistake, incel communities are bound together by an ideology which preaches hatred of women, and has inspired deadly real-world attacks. The web-hosting services and other companies who are enabling incels need to stop doing business with disgusting hate groups — or regulators, law enforcement and legislators must and will step in to protect the public.”
Jonathan Hall, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said it was not yet possible to say whether hateful incel content could be deemed terrorism.
“There is a great deal of discussion about the use of violence in the incel world,” he said. “What’s hard for the authorities is knowing if and when this talk may result in real-world violence. If there’s a run of terrorism convictions relating to the incel ideology, it will be easier to conclude that some incel propaganda is illegal terrorist content.”
The draft Online Safety Bill will put a duty on service providers to restrict “illegal content” and leaves it up to service providers to decide what content it would, and would not, be a terrorism offence to disseminate.
Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN initiative working with the global tech industry, said the bill was not nearly radical enough. “It strikes us as absurd that the Online Safety Bill proposes to make executives at tech companies criminally responsible but not to make users who post that content criminally responsible for doing so,” he said.
Cloudflare did not respond to a request for comment.
Behind the story
In the days and weeks following the Plymouth shooting, when Jake Davison killed five people and himself, incel forums were abuzz with chatter.Many users expressed admiration. Writing a day after the shooting, one user posted on the site incels.is: “What a hero I hope he is in heaven [right now].”
Another user wrote on the same site: “A new hero has risen.” A third said: “One of us! One of us!”
Similar posts were made on other incel websites. On looksmax.org, which describes itself as “a community dedicated to . . . the art of improving your appearance”, one user wrote: “Poor Jake, I wish he was still with us.” Other users questioned why Davison did not shoot more “Stacies”, the term used to refer to women whom incels view as sexually unattainable.
One user wrote in response: “Because he was low IQ. If he was a high IQ incel he would have shot up a feminist rally or joined a feminist community and taken their addresses.”
Davison, 22, below, killed his mother, Maxine Davison, 51, Lee Martyn, 43, and his three-year-old daughter Sophie, Stephen Washington, 59, who was walking his dog and Kate Shepherd, 66.
In a series of online video messages Davison described himself as an incel, a reference to the movement of “involuntary celibate” young men who blame women for their sexual failings. Davison, who was autistic, spoke about mass shootings, lamented his virginity and said women had low IQs.
After the shooting, Davison was frequently likened to Elliot Rodger on incel forums. In 2014 Rodger stabbed to death three fellow students in California and shot another three before killing himself.
Rodger left a 137-page “manifesto” and a YouTube video revealing that he carried out the attack because of his hatred for people in relationships. Forum users hailed Davison as “a new ER”.
However, counter-terrorism officers exploring Davison’s motivation ruled out incel beliefs, saying they were not behind the attack.
Massive rise in use of incel sites that call for women to be raped
The number of visits to hate-filled “incel” forums, where users discuss raping women, has increased more than fivefold in nine months, data shows.Since March, U
www.thetimes.co.uk
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