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

  • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    56·
    4 days ago

    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!?

    • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      54·
      4 days ago

      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.