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.
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.
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.
i also plan on getting a phd in english do not worry. if i got english enough i will go full english
🤣
Argyle patterning though?
Of course! You wouldn’t want to be confused for working class!