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.
They hide behind terminology, all the while making a mockery of academic ethics and a correct method of gathering and interpreting data. Like you said, no actual explanation of what “defending China” constitutes as, or why this is bad, or how there is misinformation involved.
You can probably find papers published by their own professors in five min of searching that actually analyze those questions, but these idiots just take it as an article of faith that “thing=bad” and that that is enough.
These types are profoundly incurious about the world. It is all about repackaging what they have been told. Again, articles of faith.
They’re just taking liberal bullshit they heard from the media and giving it an academic veneer, which the aforementioned liberal media will then cite as fact. It’s a bullshit ouroboros.
1. State department cooks up some new bullshit (tankies have cooties).
2. State department bots spread the claim on
. Idiots breathlessly regurgitate it.
3. “Respectable” outlets cite random
fascists to say that tankies have cooties.
4. Wizened “academics” read their favorite liberal slop magazines and learn that tankies have cooties.
5. Said “academics” come up with the conclusion that tankies have cooties and bullshit the rest of the paper.
6. Other “academics” cite said paper to say that tankies have cooties.
7. Media cites “multiple independent Scientific StudiesTM” (never mind the million dollar grant from the Adolf Hitler Institute for Political Studies) proving that tankies have cooties.
8. “Tankies have cooties” becomes an established fact substantiated by the literature.
It’s more obvious in this case because of just how badly written and nakedly dishonest the article is, but it’s not anything new. Ghouls donate a cumulative billions to Western universities every year with the understanding that the neoliberal ideology factories will churn this kind of slop out to drown the Western mind in a deluge of bullshit.
And they don’t even have to hand over bags of money with dollar signs on them to get academics to write this shit, they have been immersed in ideology for so long that they actually believe they are making valuable contributions to the field (and in a sense, they are; it’s a return-on-investment for the aforementioned ghouls).
Taking things=bad as an article of faith is basically the entire premise of social media analysis papers. They’re very fed-coded and are virtually all published by grants to combat “misinformation”, which is vaguely defined and mostly seems to mean, “whatever is against the ruling class liberal status quo PR teams want to be true today”.
Here is a Nature paper in this vein about “pro-Russian misinformation” from just last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-60653-y . It is just as meaningless and thing=bad-y as this post’s paper, but it is written better, has better graphics, uses more sophisticated jargon, and comes from a more prestigious group.
Yeah I don’t read a ton of papers on social media, but from what I have, they really do trend towards just data and then a statement that each input means a certain thing full stop. Even when not about politics. It is like the bottom of the barrel for academia
Lol no kidding
All mentions of Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary constitute “pro-Russian misinformation” (regarding the 2022 invasion).
HOLD THE FORT. Look at this smoking gun.
People are SHARING THINGS on social media! Only Russia could think of a scheme this twisted.
And this is the most prestigious journal on the planet.