A new study of popular men’s rights forums and subreddits has found that men on the internet have become ‘more toxic and espouse nihilistic and extreme anti-women ideologies.’

The study, by a team of researchers from University College London, Birmingham University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and others, looked at 38.4 million posts from seven message boards and 57 subreddits collectively described as the ‘manosphere.’

According to the team, the manosphere is a ‘conglomerate of predominantly Web-based misogynist movements roughly focused on men’s issues.’

According to a study of 38.4 million posts on message boards and subreddits, men's rights advocates have grown more extreme and toxic in recent years

Some of these sites include The Attraction, Rooshv, SlutHate, and Incel.is, as well as Reddit subgroups for Pick Up Artists (PUA), Men’s Rights Activists (MRA), and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Involuntary Celibates (Incels).

Many of these groups have existed for years, but the team found that the newer variations tended to produce much more radical and violent rhetoric, according to a Newsweek report on the study.

They found forums for specific sites tended to have the most extreme rhetoric, featuring more explicit hate speech than Reddit.

The team also found that many people participated in multiple forums and subreddits, giving the impression that the 'manosphere' as a whole might be larger than it actually is.

They also suggest that many posters had been on a pathway toward more radical beliefs.

According to the team, newcomers to the 'manosphere,' a large network of different men's rights-focused websites and subreddits, tend to be even more extreme than longtime posters

‘Many of the individuals involved with the PUA community went onto more extreme anti-feminist communities such as [The Red Pill], which in turn strongly migrated to MGTOW,’ the team argue.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a substantial overlap between the general tenets of the manosphere and white supremacy.

‘Both the alt-right and the manosphere agree that feminism is the cause of Western civilizational decline,’ the group argues.

‘In fact, the misogyny intrinsic to the 'alt-right' might very well be one of its distinctive features.’

Men’s rights jargon has played a role in a number of mass shootings in recent years.

In 2019, a 24 year-old who killed nine students at a Dayton, Ohio high school after having previously kept a ‘rape list’ of women that had rejected his romantic or sexual advances.

In 2018, a 26 year-old Toronto man killed 10 people in downtown Toronto after writing a Facebook post in which he declared allegiance to the ‘Incel Rebellion.'

Most famously, in 2014 Elliot Rodger killed seven people near the campus of UC Santa Barbara after writing a manifesto blaming women for the fact that he was a 22-year-old virgin who had ‘never even kissed a girl.’