Language of the Swedish Manosphere with Swedish FrameNet

Abstract

The manosphere is a loose group of online communities centralised around the themes of anti-feminism, misogyny, and hetero-masculinity. It has gained a reputation for violent extremism, particularly from members of the incel community. Sweden sees one of the highest volumes of online traffic to well-known incel forums in all of Europe. In spite of this, there is little information on manosphere/incel culture in Swedish. This paper uses posts from Flashback's manosphere subforum automatically annotated with Swedish FrameNet to analyse the language community in a Swedish context. To do so, a lexicon for the Swedish manosphere was created and terms of interest were identified in the Swedish discourse. Analysis of prominent semantic frames linked to these terms of interest presents a detailed look into the language of the Swedish manosphere.