Weekly Economics Podcast: Is our digital economy breeding misogyny?

In August this year Jake Davison, a 22-year-old from Plymouth, went on a shooting rampage that left six dead, including his mother and himself. In the aftermath it emerged that Davison had been a member of ​‘incel’ forums online. He’s not the first mass shooter to have links to online groups espousing extreme hatred of women. Since Elliot Rodger killed six people in California in 2014, self-proclaimed ​‘involuntary celibates’ have carried out multiple mass murders, mostly in North America.

What’s driving this extreme misogyny? Is incel ideology on the rise? And are Big Tech companies to blame for allowing these groups to thrive online? 

Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined Debbie Ging, associate professor in the school of communications at Dublin City University.

• Find out more about Zizi Papacharissi’s work on affective publics 
• Michael Kimmel’s book Angry White Men is available here
• Read Amnesty’s report on Toxic Twitter 
• The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism by Ben Little and Alison Winch is available here
• Find out more about Debbie Ging’s work

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