This study investigates the presence of left-wing extremism on the Lemmygrad.ml instance of the decentralized social media platform Lemmy, from its launch in 2019 up to a month after the bans of the subreddits r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou.
We conduct a temporal analysis on Lemmygrad.ml’s user activity, with also measuring the degree of highly abusive or hateful content. Furthermore, we explore the content of their posts using a transformer-based topic modeling approach.
Our findings reveal a substantial increase in user activity and toxicity levels following the migration of these subreddits to Lemmygrad.ml.
We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content.
Overall, our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of political extremism within decentralized social networks and emphasize the necessity of analyzing both ends of the political spectrum in research.
By excluding hexbear, the most posting of the tankies, what could their data even say? Along with all the other things people have said here.
They love to say this, then they try it and get completely called out and banned within 30 minutes
Proceeds to immediately out themselves by saying racist shit directed towards Palestinians, Roma or Russians.
Meanwhile, the average liberal.
I mean you can just take the opposite of the US foreign policy position on any given issue and >90% of the time you’ll be on the right side of history. What makes chuds easy to spot is that they can’t help doing something racist while they’re at it.
Every time they try this they give themselves away by trying to say Comrade Putin or something transphobic
A lemmitor making bad faith arguments and making shit up? Well I never—
I’m pretty sure I remember seeing this two years ago and it’s the same authors, makes it even funnier that they’re still doing this lmao.
Behold: the stunning incompetencd rife in academia. One does not need to understand a subject matter or produce an interesting and well-executed result, they must only please their funders and publish. There are errors all over the place, beginning with the basic premise of not critically examining their loaded term, “extremism”, but I’ll point out things I found funny.
The two most popular communities, c/genzhouarchive and c/genzedong, are related to left-wing extremist subreddits that have faced restrictions from Reddit
c/genzhouarchive, as you might guess from the name, is an archive basically bereft of user interaction. It just reproduces the posts from the subreddit and naturally hasn’t had new posts in two years. They call this the “most popular” presumably because it has the most posts but refused to rub their big braincells together long enough to understand its content… again, obvious from even just the name.
where r/GenZedong was quarantined for spreading misinformation (Chow 2022)
Again a loaded term that goes uncritically examined. The factual accuracy of what is said is never contended with in this article nor the citation. Per the citation it is misinformation because Reddit the company said it and some Reddit users made allegations.
This is also a subgenre of academic grifting and it goes hand in hand with these “topix modeling” papers that look at Reddit, Twitter, etc. It is primarily a way to receive funding from liberal institutions to “understand misinformation” etc on social media and they all use the same vacuous terminology and methods of investigation, generally without critical investigation of the meaning of their own work. Meaning it simply asserted, simplistically.
Our manual inspection on the banners of these subreddits finds that they fit Petterson’s description of contemporary tankies (Petterson 2020)
lmao they put quotes around so many terms but not tankies. The axe-grinding political incompetents can’t hide their angle despite the pretenses.
Also their citation is to a “biblical studies” journal and article by a big Foucault fan. The authors presumably have no idea who Foucault is and cited this just to have a citation for the word tankie, something I find amusing.
Temporal Analysis
They created an entire plot and wrote sentences about how the genzhou archive stopped having posts because it is an archive and got banned from Reddit. So they did understand it as an archive but still say “most popular” out of incredible intellectual laziness. And then waste time saying anything more about it, including posts going down when the thing it copies from goes away. lmao.
The same plot shows genzedong posts rocketing after the subreddit is banned. It was a life raft community. That means the thing it was meant to do happenes. This fact is never mentioned, it is jist characterized as “when banned extremists go elsewhere”, wow what an analysis.
Monthly Perspective Analysi
These people are so lazy they didn’t even do their own sentiment modeling. They just sent posts to a Google API and accepted the results for things like “severe profanity” and “identity attack”. What those mean is never questioned. Is this article full of identity attacks because it uses the term tankie? The authors could never think to ask that kind of question.
Anyways this laziness reminds me of many academics I’ve known. Real grifters that think highly of themselves but always take the easiest path that sounds high tech because it means more funding and press.
They do not provide a single example of how a given post correlates to a given set of topic scores, sentiments, etc. The results are simply accepted. This is classic lazy academic behavior when it comes to “analyzing” social media. What they actually want to do, but never state, is to produce some pretty graphics by turning a mass corpus of posts into categorized numbers, sometimes as a network, and to say some meaningless garbage about the results to fit some agenda.
Topic Analysis
Here they seem to have actually run some models, though again using someone else’s package. The choice of this package is never explained. They do mention its basic attributes in order to embed like 5 more pointless citations, though.
The top topic from their fancy analysis? “ridic, neatza, totes”. Wow, you sure did extract data! So meaningful! The second? “xd, tysm, ja” Lmao. The third? “dprk, korea, kim” finally, a topic! The tankies discussed the DPRK around this time! Amazing! Anything more to say about that? No? Cool! Great work!
They then say that the users of a communist country support the DPRK and China (but how!?) and cherry pick an example of antisemitism that was from a user that was banned 5 years ago, i.e. long before this article was written. They do not mention that this person was banned nor that the antisemitism was called out. They leave it implied that banned comments are actually representative of the community. Liberal academics premise their existence on incuriosity and dishonesty.
It is interesting to note that there are 3 years of more recent material that they did not “analyze”. Conspicuously they only cover a couple months after the genzedong and genzhou quarantines/bans despite showing and modeling years prior. It is conspicuous. They do have more recent citations, however. I wonder if they were just lazy or incompetent or if they have just been shopping this thing around for 3 years and couldn’t be asked to update their plots.
Either way, this is basically incomoetent Masters student level work that should never have been published. It waa presented at some recent conference.
The entire point of this horseshit article is to academify neoliberal propaganda. It becomes Official Scientific TruthTM since they did ScienceTM stuff (bringing up a bunch of contextless numbers and stating a conclusion) before coincidentally reaching a finding that confirms their preconceived ideas word-for-word.
The authors are priests of neoliberal ideology literally paid by their university’s donor ghouls to churn out neoliberal propaganda. They’ve turned academic dishonesty into a profession
Yes, absolutely. There’s a self-reinforcing publication process for this, where once there are enough papers to cite you can just keep writing the same basic things over and over again, asserting them to be true because Dr. Adolph Mussolini et al said so in 2023 and the Freedom Burger Eagle Institute confirmed it in 2024 (neither substantiated the claim). And now there are 3 to cite for the next ghouls, and so on, and then you can start a Lemmy Extremism Studies Working Group funded by the German government and start making your own conferences and journals and so on ad infinitum so long as funding keeps coming in.
Turn made up bullshit into unquestionable gospel with this one simple trick!
Indeed! This is basically what Adrian Zenz and his collaborators did.
They hide behind terminology, all the while making a mockery of academic ethics and a correct method of gathering and interpreting data. Like you said, no actual explanation of what “defending China” constitutes as, or why this is bad, or how there is misinformation involved.
You can probably find papers published by their own professors in five min of searching that actually analyze those questions, but these idiots just take it as an article of faith that “thing=bad” and that that is enough.
These types are profoundly incurious about the world. It is all about repackaging what they have been told. Again, articles of faith.
They’re just taking liberal bullshit they heard from the media and giving it an academic veneer, which the aforementioned liberal media will then cite as fact. It’s a bullshit ouroboros.
1. State department cooks up some new bullshit (tankies have cooties).
2. State department bots spread the claim on
. Idiots breathlessly regurgitate it.3. “Respectable” outlets cite random
fascists to say that tankies have cooties.4. Wizened “academics” read their favorite liberal slop magazines and learn that tankies have cooties.
5. Said “academics” come up with the conclusion that tankies have cooties and bullshit the rest of the paper.
6. Other “academics” cite said paper to say that tankies have cooties.
7. Media cites “multiple independent Scientific StudiesTM” (never mind the million dollar grant from the Adolf Hitler Institute for Political Studies) proving that tankies have cooties.
8. “Tankies have cooties” becomes an established fact substantiated by the literature.
It’s more obvious in this case because of just how badly written and nakedly dishonest the article is, but it’s not anything new. Ghouls donate a cumulative billions to Western universities every year with the understanding that the neoliberal ideology factories will churn this kind of slop out to drown the Western mind in a deluge of bullshit.
And they don’t even have to hand over bags of money with dollar signs on them to get academics to write this shit, they have been immersed in ideology for so long that they actually believe they are making valuable contributions to the field (and in a sense, they are; it’s a return-on-investment for the aforementioned ghouls).
Taking things=bad as an article of faith is basically the entire premise of social media analysis papers. They’re very fed-coded and are virtually all published by grants to combat “misinformation”, which is vaguely defined and mostly seems to mean, “whatever is against the ruling class liberal status quo PR teams want to be true today”.
Here is a Nature paper in this vein about “pro-Russian misinformation” from just last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-60653-y . It is just as meaningless and thing=bad-y as this post’s paper, but it is written better, has better graphics, uses more sophisticated jargon, and comes from a more prestigious group.
Yeah I don’t read a ton of papers on social media, but from what I have, they really do trend towards just data and then a statement that each input means a certain thing full stop. Even when not about politics. It is like the bottom of the barrel for academia
Lol no kidding
All mentions of Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary constitute “pro-Russian misinformation” (regarding the 2022 invasion).
HOLD THE FORT. Look at this smoking gun.
People are SHARING THINGS on social media! Only Russia could think of a scheme this twisted.
And this is the most prestigious journal on the planet.
The authors presumably have no idea who Foucault is
Postmodernists were essential to the destruction of socialism in the last century and the philosophy is fundamentally anticommunist, I wouldn’t be so sure
I think the Danish researcher they cite has read Foucault. I think the (largely computer science-associated) incompetent authors of this paper likely have not. They don’t seem particularly aware of the basic terminology and facts about the topic they are describing. Very few people, for example, are going to write “Marxist/Leninist” when they mean, “Marxist-Leninist”. They don’t even recognize the terminology nor their errors.
This paper is what incompetent “data scientist” liberals publish all the time about social media. Their methodological focus is entirely divorced from political analysis or social sciences or even trying to understand the basica of the topic. Many engineering faculty think they can do better simply because they can do math and computer things. And they gladly poison their work with their underdeveloped political opinions, conflating them with data and statistical analysis.
Most of our enemies are not very informed. They’re not misleading because they read a few French post-Marxists etc etc, but because they are convinced they don’t need any further education than some liberal mythmaking about constitutions and free markets.
Whoa whoa whoa, they wrote Marxist/Leninist? BWHWHAHAHAHA these fucking dipshits. I don’t care what your politics are, that kind of incompetence is unacceptable on a high school research project.
Postmodernists were essential to the destruction of socialism in the last century and the philosophy is fundamentally anticommunist,
Postmodernism was essential to eurocommunism and revisionism. It’s also against almost everything diamat stands for (e.g. its focus on subjectivism, viewpoint epistemology, obfuscation of class war with identitarianism)
can you explain this in more detail or send me an article? i’ve never heard this before
Personally I find a lot of the arguments put forward by Gabriel Rockhill quite convincing, maybe check out this video.
If 2 hour YouTube videos aren’t your thing I can dig out an article later or maybe try to type up my own bastardised thoughts, but I’m currently at work, apologies!
the lecture does a good job of situating foucault as a person and outlining how radical thought is controlled in academia but I don’t think he makes a case about “post-modernism”, just academia in general and foucault in particular.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The best part of being an academic yourself is that you stop seeing other academics as being automatically superior to people who could not enjoy their level of education.
You can get away with a lot of bullshit in academia.
Academia is mostly bullshit because the economic and social incentives require most professors to be self-promoting hucksters. And they are not punished for doing this, up to and including “light” plagiarism and all kinds of abuse towards students and employees, if they bring in grant money. Only crystal clear faking of results seems to impact such people and even then they seem to do all right in their next positions elsewhere.
But of course in unified Germany if you are a pharmacology researcher and a party member for apolitical reasons, you cannot be trusted and will not get to keep your job.
Turns out everyone I knew in college who failed classes because their papers were academically lazy and dishonest should’ve just kept going and they would’ve ended up with a career in writing articles about tankies
Temporal analysis
Analysis means nothing I guess. Its literally listing words and word count. Then says wow isn’t that scary. This is pathetic.
Sometimes it gets slightly more complicated than that (e.g. associating via word semantics similarity) but the actual meaningfulness of the output does not automatically improve. So adding more “sophisticated” analysis can just act like a smokescreen, a black box summary data generator (like that Google API) that authors like this can point at and make baseless conjectures about.
As far as I can tell, it was not published anywhere, which means it wasn’t peer reviewed. It’s on a preprint server and was presented at a conference. The former is basically no better than just putting it on Facebook, and the barrier to entry on the latter is very, very low. It’s really easy to get low-quality shit accepted as a conference paper (I’ve presented tons of low-quality shit of my own at conferences).
It’s in the proceedings of the conference in July: https://www.workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2024_44.pdf
Proceedings are the publication part of conferences. Every conference paper ends up in proceedings, it is the only public conference artifact maintained after the conference ends outside of recordings of talks.
As I said, conference quality and review varies wildly and by field. In math, for example, conferences are more prestigious and no, it is not “easy” to just do a conference instead of publishing in a journal. This is also true in many computer science, statistics, and machine learning fields, which is vaguely where this might fall, as a soft application of the methods. The entire subfield in which they are publishing is a joke, so I do not expect anything about social media topic modeling or sentiment analysis to be particularly insightful or academically honest, but this actually applies to many fields with seemingly “rigorous” peer review, which is frequently a very poor filter. Many boring and redundant papers get published in major journals simply because they come from famous labs, for example. And good papers are rejected for petty or self-interested reasons.
Publication in a conference proceeding doesn’t usually count as “publication” in the usual sense. Proceedings aren’t peer reviewed. The only qualification is being accepted at the conference, and since anyone can (and does) put on a conference, that doesn’t carry a tremendous amount of weight.
Being accepted at the conference is peer review. The process is often identical to submitting to a journal. Submit, get accept/reject/opportunity to resubmit with improvements, and if accepted, attend the conference, often giving a talk.
Conference organizers constantly have to recruit reviewers for this purpose.
Proceedings include the accepted papers.
And you are just wrong about the weight / prestige. It varies by field. In biology, conferences are much less prestigious. In engineering, sometimes conferences are the only thing anyone ever cares about and submits papers to. And there are many cases that blend the two, such as ACM, where conference papers can go into journal issues as well, and this spans many fields.
no mention of hexbear
are we cooked
not enough beanis posting to be noticed I guess :/… sad times
i tried so hardYou’re gonna need to start putting in 16 hour shifts in the beanis mines.
Hex!?! Who
Imagine putting your name on this embarrassing shit as a serious academic and using the word tankie in your paper.
It’s larping, but as academics. At least the far right larp as like navy seals or militia that go outside lmao. Instead liberals larp as academics without any of the seriousness or rigor.
I regret to inform you that this is fairly representative of liberal academic “analysis” of social media. The authors are just less competent at covering their asses with jargon and pretty plots.
See: the “academic analysis” of 2016 social media that “proved” Russian propaganda swayed the vote for Trump without offering up a single voter whose mind was changed by it.
Especially funny in the light of recent revelations that Obomba and dems were manufacturing the russiagate and still lost, twice.
I mentioned this to someone a few years back and they confidently responded with, “my mom works at the state department and she says it’s real”.
My mom also works at the Lying About Shit Department and she say’s there’s a Chinese Jewish space laser
And his uncle works at Nintendo.
lol almost every single political “””science””” academic is just as vain and unserious. They’re just better at sounding smarter. What a coincidence that all their findings line up identically with state department talking points!
I’m going to do an intensive scientific analysis of the inside of my toilet after I decentralize my bowels into it.
left-wing extremist (specifically, tankie)
I am a serious academic
Me writing a serious paper about the 1844 presidential election:
while the hangwringing lib branch of the Democrats favored Martin van Buren, James K. Polk soon clenched victory through his support among treatlerite hogs
this made me crack up
check the source on how he defines a tankie also
Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies
Oh come ON
We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content.
What an incredible sentence
Israel is not authoritarian
It’s unbelievably easy to blend into a tankie crowd, there is absolutely no nuance required. I’d even go so far as to say that a nuanced take of any kind actually makes you stick out.
West = Every single thing Bad. China = every single thing Perfect.
Master that formula and you’re golden.
lol. We definitely don’t criticize China on here at all. I guess because our criticism is ironically more nuanced than “Tin Omen 1984 authoritarians”, they think it’s not critical enough.
It’s unbelievably easy to blend into a tankie crowd, there is absolutely no nuance required. I’d even go so far as to say that a nuanced take of any kind actually makes you stick out. West = Every single thing Bad. China = every single thing Perfect. Master that formula and you’re golden.This is so stupid because the neoliberal world view is the exact same fucking thing but mirrored.
Anyone that doesn’t want to submit to western supremacy = bad.
Everyone that does submit to western supremacy = good strategic allies.
Master that formula and you’re golden.
They have absolutely no self awareness. They’ve learned nothing. They’ve not thought one bit about what the current global situation is, they do not understand dialectics. Ironically the smarter neoliberals DO and they’re properly waging this conflict while understanding the sides and why people support one side or the other.
Imperialism vs anti-imperialism is the primary contradiction of the current world.
Older Anti-Communist historians and academics actually could determine the difference between different communists, and bothered to wonder WHY people thought certain ways. That there was a process that leads people somewhere.
West = Every single thing Bad
What are you quoting?
A comment from the thread that was linked in the OP.
I missed that. Thanks.
I think my mind glossed over it because I assumed it was a link to the paper.
New site tagline just dropped
Lemmygrad.ml from its inception in 2019 to one month after the migration of left-wing extremist (specifically, tankie)
I’m a very serious academic
yeah I cant be arsed to check what credentials these people have or what they did this study for
because no matter the answer the circumstances are incredibly stupid
EDIT: I just found out more and it’s worse than incredibly stupid
complete loser move
uses “tankies” unironically
deeply unserious
What the hell are some of these keyword groupings???
Discussing the contentious topic of checks notes “xd, tysm, ja”…
Also throwing in “Jews, Jewish” with “Israel” while not including “zionism, zionists” is very telling on themselves.
Looking into the authors, the same trio published this in 2023: https://gnet-research.org/2023/10/02/tankies-a-data-driven-understanding-of-left-wing-extremists-on-social-media/
[Jeremy Blackburn’s] award-winning research into understanding toxic behaviour, hate speech, and fringe and extremist Web communities has been covered in the press by The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Infowars, among others.
WAIT, INFOWARS!? WHAT!?
Overall, that paper is mostly the same as this one, comparing “tankie” subreddits to demsoc and anarchists ones and drawing the same conclusions about “muh extremism”.
I then noticed this claim:
[The idea of tankies dismissing the Uyghur genocide] is strengthened by reports of r/GenZedong (a tankie subreddit) showing aggression towards Uyghurs online.
Seemed suspicious. They cite a Time article about harrassment on Reddit that mentions in passing:
In subreddits about China like r/sino and r/genzedong, users attack Uyghurs and promote violence against them.
The sources for these two claims are two posts on r/chinareddits. This is like Ethan Klein sourcing all his Hasan footage from r/destiny. The post for the latter claim has been deleted by the creator, but for “users [verbally] attacking Uyghurs” the evidence is this:
Users piling on a “Uyghur activist” who works in motherfuckin’ Guantanamo Bay.
And just this one person, so talking about harrassmnt of “Uyghurs” plural is unsubstantiated extrapolation.
Haha, I remember that shitshow, even for
it was a little too much to claim that Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay had it better than the ones living normal lives in China.There are a lot of people asking questions about my “we don’t force feed muslims pork” t-shirt that I feel are answered by the t-shirt
Time put this nonsense between Hindutva Islamophobia and Portuguese racism
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
TNYT and Washington Post both kinda line up with Infowars by now tbh
Don’t mention “ridic” or “neatza” on Lemmygrad—worst mistake of my life!
vai de curul meu, nu am voie sa zic buna dimineatza?!
ma pis pe mine de nervi acum, astia mi-au ridicat nervii-n cer
cough cough sorry. i hope those researchers saw my grok comic lmfao
You saying you don’t like pitch black?
gorb, bonk, eussr
It’s gorbin’ time!
ay mates,
lelkinslemmygrad person herei find the keywords hilarious, how the fuck are the top words just romanian slang for “good morning” AND the romanian word for “raise or carry something”? i could’ve said “lol i did that” but i barely speak romanian here
also lmao tankie, loool taonkie look we are smart we use words like TENCHI end REDFAȘ
don’t professional research papers require professional research words? i wasn’t allowed to write short versions of “do not” or “was not” in my uni paper!!
also what do they mean by toxic? if i was the same way with the same shitposts but on reddit for example, i’d be given death threats becAUSE THAT FUCKING HAPPENED TO ME EVERY TIME I WAS IN PUBLIC AS A LIBERAL BACK IN THE DAY
THIS IS THE LEAST TOXIC PLACE IF YOU ARE A NICE PERSON. IF I WAS POSTING MY DRAWINGS ANYWHERE BUT HERE AND LEMMYGRAD I’D BE PUT IN A CRINGE COMPILATION, OKAY?! GOD. DAMMIT.
Turns out that being “academics” doesn’t change the fact that they’re just as stupid as every other turbolib moron
this implies i am smart lmao
insert picture of queen from deltarune lighting up the acronym LMAO on her visor eyes
When it comes to publishing the standards vary massively by which reviewers you get and where you are publishing. The veneer of academic language increases your chances of publishing but doesn’t need to be perfect. And this is from a conference, which, depending on the field, tend to have lower standards.
But even the most prestigious publications are full of absolute garbage when it comes to social media “analysis”. That entire “field” is just a way to extract funding based on hype, buzzwords, and sucking uo.
wait, there’s a field on shitposting?
why can’t i be hired on that? i could funny some posts and get paid for it??? WHAT
If you learn Python and very basic stats and plots, yes you absolutely can. Sign up for grad school or a similar academic programming where they have $500k grants for nonsense like this and they will pay you to produce meaningless “topics” and “sentiments” that you can interpret without rigor - so long as your peers agree with you.
GOD DAMMIT
i literally had a course in python like 4-5 years ago? and i’ve been trying so hard to just get a job as a junior developer because i paid GOOD money for certifications and shit
i was literally the guy at uni who made a project that compared a government-backed british documentary about romani folk immigrants (“The Romanians are Coming”) with fucking top gear
had i known about this i would’ve been jordan peterson 2 (jordan peterson but better and actually me)
There’s still money for this in Europe! It’s not too late to be professionally full of it! Plus you can start wearing wool vests.
Argyle patterning though?
Of course! You wouldn’t want to be confused for working class!
how do i do that if i already have a job
also i’ll study english in my master’s degree and then wonder why i always hated math cause i threw away the road to 100 thousand dollars a year and a fucking bookshelf full of eastern cartoon statues like ALL GOOD STEREOTYPICAL LINUX USERS DO
I’M BROKE!
and before anyone goes “uh UH not all linux users have anime collections” i would have a collection of luigi figures
🤣
A good trick is to start a PhD, which is usually a paid position (either teaching or research), and exit with a Master’s after two years of courses if you aren’t feeling it. The stuff you do would be basically identical but you’d get paid for a nearly guaranteed nerd job at the university. And they waive tuition.
You don’t need to do this by any means but it is doable if you want to go in that direction.
