A narrow gateway from misogyny to the far right: empirical evidence for social media exposure effects

Abstract

Misogynist content is part of everyday social media use, exposing targets to great harm and normalizing problematic beliefs. Traditional gender hierarchies connect with far-right ideology, expressed intensely in online communities of the manosphere and the alt-right. Scholars have argued that this connection between hateful ideologies could work as a gateway from misogyny to further extremism. Building on these arguments, we provide empirical evidence for the gateway hypothesis within social media environments from a two-wave panel survey in Austria (NW1 = 1522; NW2 = 1033). Path analysis reveals that sexist content exposure boosts contact with far-right content over time, which is amplified for fringe environments of exposure. Further, sexist content exposure is related to behavioral measures for far-right extremism but not to attitudinal measures, whereas far-right content predicts none of the radicalization measures. Our findings suggest the relevance of individual and environmental factors for gateway mechanisms, establishing valuable insights for future research.