New research by US academics reveals how a controversial online forum for ‘men’s rights activists’ radicalised its members to back Trump in the 2016 US election.

Pierce Dignam and Deana Rohlinger at Florida State University analysed 1,762 posts left on the anti-feminist Reddit forum the Red Pill. In a new paper published this month, they describe how the forum abandoned its original apolitical stance in the run-up to the election and instead radicalised its members to support Trump’s candidacy.

The Red Pill forum was set up in 2012 by a Reddit user named “pk_atheist” – later revealed to be former Republican lawmaker Robert Fisher. Since then it has become one of the more notorious spaces in the “manosphere” – a loose online coalition of men’s rights activists (MRAs), ‘pick-up artists’ and other male supremacists.

Taking the ‘Red Pill’ refers to the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix where the main character takes a red pill and is awakened to the reality of the world around him. For the ‘manosphere’, this “awakening” is recognising how society is supposedly rigged against men.

According to the academics’ research, the Red Pill forum adopts a position of “patriarchal resistance which forcefully denies that feminist issues such as domestic violence, sexual assault and gendered wage gaps are structural issues that (re)produce women’s oppression.”

They describe how its users “bond through the shared dehumanisation of women” and the “oppressive othering of women as a group”. Red-pillers – as people from this community identify themselves – want to wage war against feminism to defend men’s place in the world. They share a belief that women are “socialised as parasites of society”.

References to experiencing a “Red Pill moment”, or being “red-pilled” are also common among alt-right groups, who believe they’ve been awakened to a “white genocide” being covered up by feminists, liberals and communists.