New Research Finds Largest Incel Forum Nearly Doubled in Size and Exposes Backlash to Netflix’s Adolescence

Hit Netflix show provoked increased misogyny, antisemitism and racism, explicit hate speech and slurs within incel community.

WASHINGTON, DC – Monday, May 19, 2025 – The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published new research today documenting significant growth of the largest active online incel forum, showing that it has nearly doubled in size to 30,000 members since the publication of CCDH’s breakthrough 2022 report, The Incelosphere, which found that these online spaces were consumed with calls for sexual violence against women and children. 

The research also revealed that the platform attracted more than 2.7 million visits in the first quarter of this year, an overall spike from previous activity.  

CCDH researchers found that incel forum members reacted to Adolescence with a surge in violent rhetoric. One in four posts referencing the show included racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, alongside heightened calls for violence, often featuring explicit hate speech and slurs. Researchers noted that the majority of posts discussing the show expressed negative sentiment, with 67% containing direct criticism of the series or its media coverage – frequently alleging that the writers misrepresented incel communities. 

Imran Ahmed, CEO, the Center for Countering Digital Hate said:

“As Netflix’s Adolescence sparked renewed interest and fear around issues facing young men online, CCDH took a look back at the incel forum we investigated in 2022 and found a disturbing trend: the misogyny and extremism we saw three years ago has not only intensified, it’s multiplied. Incel communities, where young men and boys are encouraged to hate and hurt women, are not hidden in the deepest recesses of the dark web—these communities of tens of thousands of men are operating in front of our children’s eyes, accessible in the browsers of their cell phones.  

I encourage parents to have deeper conversations with their children that span beyond the fictional show and into the reality of radicalization facing young boys. This is an immediate crisis that demands more research and urgent action from policymakers, tech companies, and parents.”  

While Adolescence has initiated an important conversation about the risks young boys face in online spaces, particularly on social media, those discussions must now go further. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is calling for urgent and coordinated action from policymakers, technology platforms, and parents to address the growing threat posed by incel ideology. The organization is also advocating for robust regulation to hold technology companies accountable for enabling extremist content. 

To assist families in navigating these challenges, CCDH has released a series of explainers and a comprehensive parents’ guide. These resources aim to help caregivers and parents alike to understand the manosphere and its impact, offering clear and practical advice on how to discuss online harms with children and build their resilience to toxic narratives. 

Notes to Editors 

• For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact [email protected] 

• Full research can be found here.  

Methodology 

• The analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate examined 658 posts from the forum in discussion threads about Adolescence, made between 24 February and 23 April. 

• Researchers used Similarweb, to estimate page visits to the incel forum. Using Similarweb’s data on daily visits to the forum from 1 January to 31 March 2025, researchers were able to calculate the overall sum of page visits for the first three months of 2025, finding that the site had received 2,732,877 visits in total.