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.
Publication in a conference proceeding doesn’t usually count as “publication” in the usual sense. Proceedings aren’t peer reviewed. The only qualification is being accepted at the conference, and since anyone can (and does) put on a conference, that doesn’t carry a tremendous amount of weight.
Being accepted at the conference is peer review. The process is often identical to submitting to a journal. Submit, get accept/reject/opportunity to resubmit with improvements, and if accepted, attend the conference, often giving a talk.
Conference organizers constantly have to recruit reviewers for this purpose.
Proceedings include the accepted papers.
And you are just wrong about the weight / prestige. It varies by field. In biology, conferences are much less prestigious. In engineering, sometimes conferences are the only thing anyone ever cares about and submits papers to. And there are many cases that blend the two, such as ACM, where conference papers can go into journal issues as well, and this spans many fields.