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

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    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

    • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      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.

      • newacctidk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        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.

      • glimmer_twin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        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)

          • glimmer_twin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            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!