Inside the Italian Incel community. A survey about men's rights movements and online misogyny on Facebook Italy

The expression "violence against women" immediately and understandably evokes feminicides, but also the phenomena of misogyny and physical violence. Yet, in deeply mediatized societies like the ones we live in, analyzing and understanding the specific forms of online gender-based violence is essential: what are the forms and specificities of violence against women online? What can the study of the digital world add to the understanding of gender-based violence? These are questions that both Gender Studies and Internet Studies try to answer at the intersection of the "gender-digital" binomial by investigating how the digital can contribute to "overcoming gender rigidities". One of the hallmarks of online gender-based violence is the Incel (that stands for “Involuntarily Celibate”) community. This community is made of exclusively male individuals, united by misogynistic sentiments and the belief that feminism is the scourge of society and that one's inability to establish social relationships with the female world is women's fault. The aim of my work is to investigate the evolution of anti-feminist dynamics on Facebook Italy from 2019 to today. My research takes the form of an update of the research by Farci and Righetti (2019) recognized as a milestone in Italian literature on the subject. Quali-quantitative analysis is necessary to understand the new ways of "doing violence" via digital, in order to trace the links between online and offline contexts of hate, and to favor the understanding of a phenomenon which is configured as a social plague.