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’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).