edit: some are saying it's just a student thesis. However, the author of this paper is already an employee of the Department of Homeland Security.

edit 2: since some people are wrapped up in semantics, "thesis" is technically a more accurate term to use than "report". however, functionally, and colloquially, it serves as a 'report'

Some of you may have seen the thread posted yesterday about the FBI investigating the manosphere, including this subreddit. I commented on it an hour ago. I checked back at it just before starting this thread....and it has now been deleted

This is the original report that the thread was talking about. It's a little confusing to get to the actual PDF. You have to click the title or little PDF tab to download it as a PDF. The title of the report is "MAPPING THE MANOSPHERE: A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF THE MANOSPHERE ON REDDIT".

Now it's not an FBI report, but it is being hosted in the library of the Department of Homeland security. And yes, this subreddit is mentioned in it.

The publication is a thesis from the Naval Graduate school, a graduate school run by the navy and open to military members and civilian members of the Department of Defense.

The report is overflowing with misinformation, blatantly wrong assertions, and poorly researched analysis of the MRM, including this subreddit. So let's start with us.

r/mensrights is mentioned only 3 times in the thesis, and only once outside of the list of citation/references. They can't actually find anything bad to say about the subreddit, so they just lump us in with every toxic manosphere related subreddit, and say nothing else.

Here is the first time we are mentioned. Here is where they list the manosphere subreddits under review:

To delineate the contours of the manosphere, 11 initial subreddits were identified for analysis that represents each manosphere domain

To see r/mensrights, you have to scroll to the next page

The 11 subreddit listed are

• r/beatingwomen

• r/beatingwomen2

• r/Creepshots

• r/Braincels

• r/incels

• r/inceltears

• r/MensRights

• r/TheRedPill

• /r/MGTOW

• r/shortcels

• r/Incelswithouthate

Now, the paragraph below is noteworthy:

These subreddits were identified by looking through other manosphere sites that Reddit administrators have identified, banned, or quarantined for hateful content towards women, and through news sources identifying subreddits in their reporting

To whom did the reddit administrators identify us to? Where did the author of this thesis receive this information? Did the author directly ask for comment from the reddit admins? Was the request on behalf of the Navy, or DoD? And so, reddit has 'identified' r/mensrights as promoting hate against women? This should be followed up on, imo.

and.....that's it. If you ctrl F, r/mensrights only comes up twice more, both as references.

Reference 1

119 Karen Lumsden, “‘“I Want to Kill You in Front of Your Children” Is Not a Threat. It’s an Expression of a Desire’: Discourses of Online Abuse, Trolling and Violence on r/MensRights,” in Online Othering: Exploring Digital Violence and Discrimination on the Web, ed. Karen Lumsden and Emily Harmer (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 102–7, https ://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-12633-9_4

Which seems to be refencing a paper entitled "I Want to Kill You in Front of Your Children” Is Not a Threat. It’s an Expression of a Desire’: Discourses of Online Abuse, Trolling and Violence on r/MensRights" which I found here

Let's take a look at the summary:

This chapter adds to the growing body of literature on online misogyny and studies of Reddit by focusing on an online culture which perpetrates and encourages forms of ‘online othering’, including misogyny and violence. It focuses on Men’s Rights Activists’ (MRA) discussions of trolling and gendered violence, and their online othering of ‘outsiders’. This includes the denigration and abuse aimed at feminists and social justice warriors (SJWs). Findings are presented which focus on: denial of women and feminists as victims of online violence; the victimization of men online; and constructions of online violence. These previously unexplored online discourses provide us with a valuable insight into the construction of notions of online acceptability and deviance vis-à-vis digital communication, the boundaries between online/offline violence and culture wars.

Now even though this is just an subreddit being mentioned as a reference, the language used is concerning- it seems to suggest that r/mensrights is an favor of misogynistic violence, and just take a look at the citations used for the paper

"Phallic affect, or why men's rights activists have feelings?"

"Masculinity so fragile?"

Several papers published before this subreddit even existed?

Absolutely nonsensical.

More and more, when you dig deeper and deeper into feminist theory and literature, you find a web of interconnected circular logic and feminists using entirely subjective and abstract papers from prior feminist publications, and then cite them on their own work, and "legitimize" through repetition- feminist scholars in the 70s cite abstract, papers from the 60s, scholarships from the 80s cite these papers from the 70s, so decades later it's "established" as an inherent truth, rather than what it actually is- vague, abstract theory that doesn't reflect the real world.

Reading the whole original thesis from the DOHS library, the MRM as a whole, along with r/mensrights, is associated with genuinely hateful and extreme misogynistic entities, as if we are the same. Let's take a look at the 3rd mention of the subreddit....and its the same as the second, only this time in the link of references at the end of thesis rather than just the footnote of the page.

But what on earth does "I Want to Kill You in Front of Your Children” Is Not a Threat. It’s an Expression of a Desire’: Discourses of Online Abuse, Trolling and Violence on r/MensRights"" mean? What is in that study? I can't seem to find access to it now, but I'm going to hunt it down and see what I can find.

And that's it. Of the 109 pages, that is how much mention r/mensrights specifically receives. Now, the intent is clearly to leave the reader with the impression that this subreddit is associated with the radical and extreme and misogynistic subreddits elsewhere

I think there is much more behind the surface here. Start clicking on some of the references, and you find yourself at papers written by feminists from all over the world supporting ideas like closing women's prisons, streamlining feminist theory in elementary education, etc- something seems up, and I'm going to keep digging.