section_path: History and organization/Extremism
section_name: Extremism
paragraph_text: Extremism
  
  Incel communities became more extremist and focused on violence from the late 2010s. This has been attributed to factors including influences from overlapping online hate groups and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacist groups. The misogynistic and violent rhetoric of some members of these communities has led to numerous bans from websites and web hosts.
  
  Incel communities continue to exist on more lenient platforms including 4chan, 8chan, and Gab, as well as on web forums created specifically for the topic. More extremist self-identified incels have increasingly migrated to obscure locations including gaming chat services (such as Discord) and the dark web to avoid site shutdowns and the self-censorship that has developed among some incel communities as an effort to avoid drawing scrutiny from law enforcement or website service providers.
  
  Beginning in 2018 and into the 2020s, the incel ideology has been described by North American governments and researchers as a terrorism threat, and law enforcement have issued warnings about the subculture. In May 2019, an American man was sentenced to up to five years in prison for making terrorist threats, posting on social media, "I'm planning on shooting up a public place... killing as many girls as I see". In September 2019, the U.S. Army warned soldiers about the possibility of violence at movie theaters showing the Joker film, after "disturbing and very specific chatter" was found in conversations among self-identified incels on the dark web.
  
  A January 2020 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety warned that the incel movement was an "emerging domestic terrorism threat" that "could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types". A 2020 paper published by Bruce Hoffman and colleagues in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism concluded that "the violent manifestations of the ideology pose a new terrorism threat, which should not be dismissed or ignored by domestic law enforcement agencies".
  
  John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State University who in 2019 received a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to study the incel subculture, explained why the incel ideology equates to terrorism: "the fact that incels are aspiring to change things up in a bigger, broader ideological sense, that's, for me, what make it a classic example of terrorism. That's not saying all incels are terrorists. But violent incel activity is, unquestionably, terrorism in my view".
  
  In February 2020, an attack in Toronto that was allegedly motivated by incel ideologies became the first such act of violence to be prosecuted as terrorism, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that they consider the incel subculture to be an "Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE)" movement. In 2021, Jacob Ware wrote in Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses that analysis of incels has been focused within the United States and Canada due to the concentration of incel-motivated attacks in those countries. In March 2022, the United States Secret Service 's National Threat Assessment Center, published a case study titled "Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism", to examine the 2018 Tallahassee shooting at a hot yoga studio and draw attention to "the specific threat posed by misogynist extremism."
  
  Incel communities became more extremist and focused on violence from the late 2010s. This has been attributed to factors including influences from overlapping online hate groups and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacist groups. The misogynistic and violent rhetoric of some members of these communities has led to numerous bans from websites and web hosts.
  
  Incel communities continue to exist on more lenient platforms including 4chan, 8chan, and Gab, as well as on web forums created specifically for the topic. More extremist self-identified incels have increasingly migrated to obscure locations including gaming chat services (such as Discord) and the dark web to avoid site shutdowns and the self-censorship that has developed among some incel communities as an effort to avoid drawing scrutiny from law enforcement or website service providers.
  
  Beginning in 2018 and into the 2020s, the incel ideology has been described by North American governments and researchers as a terrorism threat, and law enforcement have issued warnings about the subculture. In May 2019, an American man was sentenced to up to five years in prison for making terrorist threats, posting on social media, "I'm planning on shooting up a public place... killing as many girls as I see". In September 2019, the U.S. Army warned soldiers about the possibility of violence at movie theaters showing the Joker film, after "disturbing and very specific chatter" was found in conversations among self-identified incels on the dark web.
  
  A January 2020 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety warned that the incel movement was an "emerging domestic terrorism threat" that "could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types". A 2020 paper published by Bruce Hoffman and colleagues in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism concluded that "the violent manifestations of the ideology pose a new terrorism threat, which should not be dismissed or ignored by domestic law enforcement agencies".
  
  John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State University who in 2019 received a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to study the incel subculture, explained why the incel ideology equates to terrorism: "the fact that incels are aspiring to change things up in a bigger, broader ideological sense, that's, for me, what make it a classic example of terrorism. That's not saying all incels are terrorists. But violent incel activity is, unquestionably, terrorism in my view".
  
  In February 2020, an attack in Toronto that was allegedly motivated by incel ideologies became the first such act of violence to be prosecuted as terrorism, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that they consider the incel subculture to be an "Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE)" movement. In 2021, Jacob Ware wrote in Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses that analysis of incels has been focused within the United States and Canada due to the concentration of incel-motivated attacks in those countries. In March 2022, the United States Secret Service 's National Threat Assessment Center, published a case study titled "Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism", to examine the 2018 Tallahassee shooting at a hot yoga studio and draw attention to "the specific threat posed by misogynist extremism."