Robert

The incels' wiki page for R9K, their main discussion board on 4chan, calls it a pseudo-incellospherian space.

Although it was a medium for some genuine incel discussion, it was never purely an incel forum, and also served as a place for people to pretend to be incel and troll actual true cells.

Now, this is interesting to me because the fact that 4chan is bigger and more vibrant as a community and thus is a better place to post in a lot of ways than these tiny little incel forums that don't get as much attention is always at war with the frustration at the fact that it's also polluted by normies, right?

You get more attention.

You can spread your ideas to more people.

But you're also going to talk to a lot of folks who aren't incels and who just want to make fun of you.

And this kind of leads to an interesting variant of what's called the toothpaste tube effect.

And that's really what's going on with all of this.

And if you haven't heard that term applied to online communities, I'll explain it here.

So the toothpaste tube effect comes out of research that was done on pro-anorexia and eating disorder content, which was some of the first stuff online that got banned in an organized way.

AOL and Yahoo start banning pro-anorexia content in 2001 and 2002.

And this is among the earliest concerted efforts of online censorship of harmful communities.

This continues for years, and between February and March of 2012, Tumblr and Pinterest, both of which hosted a lot of thinspiration memes, announced that they were also banning all such content.

But no matter how many big websites or how many social media companies banned pro-anorexia content, such sites and communities spread and proliferated across the internet, and indeed, across the world.

And this stuff in the aught starts to spread over into Europe, particularly into France, where it sparks panic among legislators.

In the EU, they start pressuring social media companies and web hosts to censor content that used specific terms associated with pro-eating disorder content.

Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect.

Rather than reducing the prevalence of such content and the size of such communities, it merely pushes them to adopt new terms in order to escape censorship and to find new hubs for their content.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Greenwich published a paper in which they mapped the French pro-anorexia community over two years using a web mining tool.

They used this to build a graph.