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.
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.
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.
Especially funny in the light of recent revelations that Obomba and dems were manufacturing the russiagate and still lost, twice.
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!