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.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40188039

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    50·
    25 days ago

    Among the “hate speech and extremist content” they cite, this is the only genuinely objectionable comment I could find:

    "1. Jews arent a nation 2. Isael is a fake country. 3. The only thing which could be more fake than Isael and the “jewish” national identity would be for the fans of start trek in to create a language of their own similar to english, then enter the bourgeoisie and amass wealth and power, and then invade some imperialized nation 200 years later, settle in it and claim their own stark-treakish fake nation state. And they will justifyng this by quoting some science fiction book written in the 1900s which tells how are they the chosen people to colonize this new land. Everyone identifing as a jew is a zionist and an enemy of the communist and anti imperialist movement.”

    Where did this come from? I’d bet ten bucks this user has been banned (if they were ever on the site at all) [Edit: Yes]. I couldn’t find the comment using the search function.