Police inspect a van involved in an incident that killed ten people at the intersection of Yonge Street and Finch Avenue on April 23, 2018 in Toronto, Canada Cole Burston/Getty Images

We don't yet know why Alek Minassian allegedly chose to drive a rented van through dozens of people on Toronto's Yonge Street, killing ten people, but a single Facebook post from the accused has driven a wave of coverage in one direction: "incels".

The breathless reporting of the online forums where self-dubbed "involuntary celibates" gather to discuss and develop their misogynist beliefs ignores a wider truth, suggesting men who violently hate women is an intriguing, new, internet-only trend. It's not. The last time Canada saw a mass murder with a victim count in the double digits was when Marc Lepine methodically murdered 14 women at a Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.


Back then neither the internet nor Facebook existed, but Lepine's suicide note explained his rationale: he hated women and believed feminists were ruining the world. He didn't need 4Chan to come to such conclusions.

"Online forums are another way of expressing that violence," says Kalwinder Sandhu, researcher in violence against women at Coventry University. "What social media does is enable the spread of that misogyny to be a lot faster. It's not locker room talk."

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Minassian was arrested after the attack rather than shot to death, so we need not depend on a single social-media post to unpick his motive, as police may well get a direct answer from the 25-year-old accused. The post may not even be real or significant, though reports from CBC suggests Facebook has confirmed it was from his account. In it, Minassian name-drops Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people in California in 2014, and references slang such as "incels" and "Chad and Stacey".

Haven't heard of incel before? After this week, you will have. There's well-meaning explainer articles and tweet-threads detailing such terms, and plenty of others recklessly normalising the attack under the guise of "sexual frustration". It's natural to seek to understand why such horrors happen and there's value in studying the monsters in our society so we can better face them, but neither happens by mindlessly reproducing extremist material or linking to such sites.


And that's what's happening. After the Toronto attack, Reddit banned yet another incel subreddit — not the first one it's shut down. At the same time, plenty of news outlets helpfully redirected readers to other sources of incel material, pointing out and linking to the "leading forum". Imagine doing the same for Isis after the London attacks or Manchester bombings. If Minassian's goal was to spread the incel ideology, he has succeeded. If it wasn't, it's happening all the same.

At the time of publication, the site frequently named as the "leading incel forum" — which we don't know if Minassian ever visited — had more than 2,200 guests viewing its pages, and only 111 members; its total membership is listed as about 5,000. The mainstream attention is being welcomed on some incel forums, with posters embracing the chance to spread their ideas and "sway normies".

On that same incel forum, one supporter angrily criticises moderators for failing to write and promote a post explaining the arguments against women to the top of the discussion board, so the influx of guests visiting the site after the Toronto massacre could potentially be convinced to join in. The same detail that incel member wanted shared is included in plenty of stories in mainstream media — The Guardian has detailed that extremist material in multiple paragraphs, for example.

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María Rún Bjarnadóttir, doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, warns against merely descriptive coverage. "They report it without challenging it and I think that is a mistake," she says. "It must be challenged… the mainstream media should be aware of what they are implying by reporting this without any critique."

By now, we should know better. And it's not as though this is the first time a young, disaffected man turned to mass violence after imbibing extremist content online — that's the route taken by Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Pulse shooter Omar Mateen and others who were thankfully not successful with their plans. The only time most of us would share a link to the sites that helped radicalise such terrorists would be to demand that authorities take it down.

Instead, because violence against women inexplicably isn't seen as terrorism, such sites and their messages are viewed as mere curiosities, as though we don't know the danger of allowing hate speech. Indeed, in the UK misogyny is not considered a hate crime, a fact debated by MPs in parliament only last month. If it were, tackling such sites under existing hate crime legislation would be easier, notes Bjarnadóttir. "If this doesn't spark the debate and take further, I seriously question what would," she adds.


If these extremist websites are to be blamed for inciting Minassian or Rodgers, they should be banned just like Isis propaganda. "Isis is obviously a terrorist organisation, and women represent half the world,” says Sandhu. “Why wouldn't we ban this too?"

That's not to say men can't talk shit about women online — there's nothing wrong with that, and Bjarnadóttir notes there's "a lot of people who don't feel like they fit into society" turning to the internet to find people like them and a safe space to try on their beliefs. However, encouraging violence, be it rape or a terror-style incident, is clearly against the law. Hate speech is illegal, with fines for videos of dogs delivering Nazi salutes and pickup artists banned from entering the country, yet the various incel forums are not blocked — instead, their messages are spread by the newspapers of record.

Even if such sites were inaccessible, we needn't scour obscure forums or head to the dark web to unpick or understand incel ideology. If that Facebook post was indeed Minassian's suicide note, we know it without catching up on incel slang — we've seen it before. Call it incel. Call it toxic masculinity. Call it misogyny. Whatever we do name it this time around, it's a sadly familiar hate crime, long taught to us by the likes of Lepine. We don't need to Google an explainer article to understand that.