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.
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!
the lecture does a good job of situating foucault as a person and outlining how radical thought is controlled in academia but I don’t think he makes a case about “post-modernism”, just academia in general and foucault in particular.
I mean, if nothing else the fact that postmodernists consciously reject modernism (to the extent that the movement can be nailed down in spite of its thinkers intentional slipperiness) tell us all we need to know about their anti-Marxism. Marxism is like, aggressively modernist.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: