A Pill of Many Colors: Negotiating Extremist Red-Pill Ideologies on Reddit

• In Event: Red-Pill or Woke? Polarization and Online Extremism

Abstract

The rise of the American far-right has led to increased attention from academics and law enforcement organizations (Perlinger, 2023). Made up of diverse factions, the far-right is generally connected around its resistance to dominant progressive cultural values (Mudde, 2017). Here we focus on the “red pill” movement, expressing anti-feminist sentiments, especially in the so-called online “Manosphere” (Ging, 2017). Borrowing the metaphor from The Matrix movies, the red pill philosophy aims at “awaking” individuals to the alleged- falsehoods and deception of feminism and progressivism, and encouraging resistance, including violent types (Ging, 2017). It’s activity was concentrated in the now-quarantined r/TheRedPill (TRP) subreddit, a space blending hegemonic masculinity with neoliberalism and sexual economics (Van Valkenburgh, 2021).
While the red pill subreddit had been studied before, very little is known about its successors, including the subreddit r/PurplePillDebate (PPD), which was created to challenge (but not explicitly reject and dismiss) the red pill agenda by offering space for deliberation between those endorsing and opposing red pill ideology. We argue this space could serve users who wish to intervene and fight radicalization. Since correction attempts to misinformation often fail when conflicting with audience values and background, we are particularly interested in deliberative spaces, where respectful cross-cutting deliberation is at least theoretically possible. Relying on Hall’s (1980) Encoding/Decoding model, we examine how users are promoting, challenging, and negotiating anti-feminist messages. We argue that the PPD may help users engage with the other side and reduce reliance on selective exposure (Stroud, 2010) to congruent information (Vidmar & Rokeach, 1974). We claim that Reddit offers unique affordances that may facilitate cross-cutting exposure, including the ability to self-select into specific subreddits (i.e., not relying on “endless scrolling” through newsfeeds), and the ranking of messages based on community voting and not opaque algorithms, which could encourage civil deliberation that doesn’t alienate the other side (who can downvote posts). In short, as the name implies, the purple pill community (purple representing a compromise between the hegemonic red and opposing blue pill communities available on Reddit) was designed as a rare space to converse with the other side (Mutz, 2006).
Our main goal is to determine what predicts increased engagement in the deliberative space. To do so, we use a mixed-method approach, with particular attention given to the role of thematic content (RQ1) and civility (RQ2). We collected N=529,660 posts and comments from the PPD subreddit. We first map the thematic content of each post and response using the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) framework (Walter & Ophir, 2019), based on topic modeling, network analysis, and community detection. We then use a novel computational approach to determine how each topic contributes to levels of engagement (Nikolaev et al., 2016). Finally, we use a manual content analysis to code for civility and examine whether incivility hinders or encourages engagement with deliberative posts.

References
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Authors

• Emily Lapan, University at Buffalo

• Yotam Ophir, University at Buffalo

• Katherine Kountz, Georgia State University

• Dror Walter, Georgia State University

• Kelly Tenzek, University at Buffalo, SUNY

• Rui Wang, University at Buffalo

• Alexander Nikolaev, University at Buffalo

• Alexander Semenov, University of Florida