r/Feminism is a feminist political subreddit discussing women's issues.[1][2] As of June 2020[update], it has 179,000 members.[3] The subreddit discusses issues that impact women and minorities, including workplace abuse and harassment, rape, domestic abuse, pink tax, cultural appropriation, and representation. Users of r/feminism are similar to the users of r/MensLib, a men's liberation subreddit; and r/againstmensrights, a subreddit against r/MensRights.[1] The subreddit sends people wanting to talk about men's issues to r/Masculism, which has been described as a "a comparably essentialist approach to feminism".[2] About 54% of posts on r/Feminism are predominantly negative.[4]
Type of site | Subreddit |
|---|---|
| URL | www.reddit.com/r/feminism |
| Commercial | yes |
| Users | 277 thousand members |
Research
editIn a survey of non–feminists in the subreddit in 2018, non–feminists said that they wanted to disrupt the community. Feminists in the subreddit have noted a level of anti–feminists in the comments. In the first quarter of 2020, about a thousand members were banned from the subreddit per month. Due to disruption, it can be difficult to differentiate good-faith and bad-faith, and feminists within the subreddit may feel uncomfortable voicing their opinions due to negative reactions by other feminists.[3]
A study of news reports of the People v. Turner on Reddit, comparing r/News, r/Feminism, and r/MensRights found that r/Feminism was the only subreddit to call Turner an "offender". r/Feminism was the only subreddit that linked to external webpages using the words "crime" or "rapist", indicating that r/feminism had a much stronger view on Turner than the other subreddits. 30% of the posts in r/feminism would reword news articles about the case, and 62.5% in r/MensRights. When comparing r/Feminism and r/MensRights, the feminist subreddit was likely to link to progressive websites, and r/MensRights were likely to link to conservative websites, meaning that both of the subreddits preferred sources which agreed with their beliefs.[5]
Users on r/Feminism have an average of 5 posts, and 0.86% of members have made over 100 posts. A 2023 study in the Discourse & Society journal looking at 496 thousand posts on r/Feminism found that 54.31% of posts on r/Feminism are predominantly negative.[6]
A 2020 study suggested that users of r/Feminism are similar to r/MensLib.[1] A November 2023 study in the Behavior Research Methods journal concluded that this is not due to random chance. The study also looked at r/MensRights, and wrote that "our results show that there is some evidence that r/MensLib shares more information in common with r/Feminism (and vice versa) than either do with r/MensRights. This provides good evidence that content from r/MensRights is conceptually more similar, and thus more closely converges with, rhetoric espoused by other feminist groups than rhetoric espoused by other groups within the manosphere."[7]
References
edit- ^ a b c Khan, Abeer; Golab, Lukasz (2020). "Reddit Mining to Understand Gendered Movements". uwaterloo.ca. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
- ^ a b En, Boka; En, Michael; Griffiths, David (2013-08-08). "Gay Stuff and Guy Stuff: The Construction of Sexual Identities in Sidebars on Reddit". Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. 6 (1). doi:10.31165/nk.2013.61.293. ISSN 1755-9944.
- ^ a b Nathan Matias, J.; Simko, Tyler; Reddan, Marianne (2020-06-25). "Study Results: Reducing the Silencing Role of Harassment in Online Feminism Discussions". Citizens and Technology Lab. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
- ^ Dilkes, Jane (2023-08-14). "Rule 1: Remember the human. A socio-cognitive discourse study of a Reddit forum banned for promoting hate based on identity". Discourse & Society. 35: 48–65. doi:10.1177/09579265231190344. ISSN 0957-9265. S2CID 260910477.
- ^ Brattland, K. (2017). Information Preferences of Reddit Communities Surrounding the Brock Turner Case. Progressive Librarian, 46(46), 86.
- ^ Dilkes, Jane (2023-08-14). "Rule 1: Remember the human. A socio-cognitive discourse study of a Reddit forum banned for promoting hate based on identity". Discourse & Society. 35: 48–65. doi:10.1177/09579265231190344. ISSN 0957-9265. S2CID 260910477.
- ^ Rosen, Zachary P; Dale, Rick (2023-11-29). "BERTs of a feather: Studying inter- and intra-group communication via information theory and language models". Behavior Research Methods. 56 (4): 3140–3160. doi:10.3758/s13428-023-02267-2. ISSN 1554-3528. PMID 38030924. S2CID 265504144.