The /r/TheRedPill Sidebar as a Tool of Collective Identity

Next up in this AoIR 2018 session is Julia deCook, who shifts our focus to Reddit – and particular its /r/TheRedPill men’s rights activism (MRA) space. MRA has grown in recent years, and represents a particularly virulent and misogynist form of male hegemony; Reddit’s TheRedPill forum plays an important role as a hub for this online community, which focusses on hypermasculinity, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist topics.

TheRedPill references the famous scene from The Matrix, and thereby suggests that men have been duped by feminism into an increasively submissive role in society. The forum has been reported by other Reddit users several times, and has currently been placed under quarantine by Reddit’s administrators, but has not been banned outright at this time. It maintains an off-site archive of posts to protect its content from deletion, and is managed in important ways through a permanent sidebar to the right of the forum, which reinforces the ideology underpinning the forum.

The sidebar defines the purpose of the forum, and introduces the forum’s official rules; it also provides links for ‘theory reading’, references to key terms, and links to other sites in the MRA ‘manosphere’. Further, there is functionality for filtering, and cross-references to other relevant subreddits. In other words, it presents the community’s fundamental doxa, and thereby serves to socialise new users into the MRA ideology.

Additionally, it serves as an entry point into the group’s archive, documenting what may or may not be said in the forum, and what is considered as ‘truth’ by its members. Archives are an important tool in cementing collective memory, of course, and shape public memory as well as positioning individual users in relation to this collective ideology. This proposes and enacts a new collective memory, a collective truth, in opposition to mainstream historical narratives, for the members of the group.