Tankies: A Data-driven Understanding of Left-Wing Extremists on Social Media - GNET
Tankies: A Data-driven Understanding of Left-Wing Extremists on Social Media - GNET
Get in here losers
We're dunking on everything
However, when it comes to everyday societal challenges that are usually points of interest for the left wing—like policing, climate change, healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights—tankies seem less engaged.
Really huge "I clicked on a couple of memes and did no further investigation" energy radiating from this sentence.
They can't identify "tankies" when they're engaged on those topics because the only method they have of defining a tankie is as someone that supports AES and opposes the state department's line.
Everyone who isn't visibly a tankie is just a regular marxist to them. And everyone who is saying anything the supports AES or opposes hegemony is a tankie and not a regular marxist.
They don't realise they're the same thing behaving differently in two different settings. Marxists aren't ranting about aes and stalin when talking about unionisation ffs.
This idea is strengthened by reports of r/GenZedong (a tankie subreddit) showing aggression towards Uyghurs online.
Oh gee, that sounds awful! I wonder what that was about?
"As an American, I am very proud of working for the US government in Guantanamo..."
Oh my god, how little self-awareness can a person have? Accusing China of having secret concentration camps while proudly declaring employment at a known, verified torture facility.
I stg every time I check the receipts on "far-left hate speech" it's in response to like, "Hi, my name is Nazi McFedstein and I love torturing minorities." How hard is it to make a wrecker account in a leftist space and then cite your own account saying something fucked up? They just don't even care because they know their audience won't follow the links because it fits their confirmation bias.
Rushan Abbas debacle is probably the only time mainstream reddit had a good reaction, IMO certainly because it was so cartoonish and incompetent to a level that(at that time) it was impossible to defend. These days the reaction would be completely different, pretty much blue MAGA would be like "oh yeah so what they're also actualy literaly a fed agent? Don't you know that is required training for understanding how to use and spread Western Values?"
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When far-right groups like QAnon and r/The_Donald were deplatformed, they migrated to alternative platforms like voat.co, Parler, and Gettr. Facing restrictions on Reddit, tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou, transitioned to Lemmygrad.ml, a Marxist/Leninist online platform. Tankies’ move not only made them dominant voices on Lemmygrad.ml but also seemed to amplify the overall toxic tone on the platform.
crackers legitimately do not realize the 'tankies'(these settler failsons' words, not mine) BUILT that one. What do I expect from settler failson 'academics' who can't do a lick of research, can't do a lick of legible statistics formatting, and can only verbalize what Uncle Sam put inside them tho. Death to the settler empire, hope I live to help tear it down.
No mention of Hexbear? We get no respect.
Not only did they fail to realize that lemmygrad was built from the ground up as a commie instance, we escaped their notice…? I don't understand how they missed us, lemmygrad and hexbear are like this: 🤞 and we're always commenting on each other's posts
Why would they mention the libs on hexbear
There are literally dozens of us!
"Far-left" like most of us aren't absolutely boring mls or traditional "i actually read theory and don't base my politics purely on vibes" anarchists.
Leningrad was before their time. Kids these days.
I love they don’t even label every color they use
It’s true that not all the Muslim countries give a shit about Muslims - see gulf states, Saudi Arabia - but anyone with half a brain should be curious why even the most pragmatic, business oriented Muslim countries aren’t willing to side with the US despite the latter basically funding their existence, or why only white countries that participated in wholesale slaughter of Muslims for 2 decades are the only ones who “genuinely” care about Muslims.
Or if they’re extremely liberal, ask why the fuck Mike Pompeo and other GOP officials are concern trolling about the welfare of Muslim prisoners in a rivaling country given their views on Muslims at home and in the Middle East
Against China: Imperialists, colonizers, white supremacists
On China's Side: All the actual Muslim-majority countries
Except Albania, poor sods, they want to enter EU so badly but don't realise it's impossible even having Turkey's example.
Aahaha these fuckin losers, these nerds get a load of this
What is a Tankie? The term tankie has seen several shifts in its connotation over the years. Originally, it was a pejorative label for communists who supported the Soviet Union’s interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Yet, its contemporary application is much broader. Today, the term refers not only to pro-Soviet hardliners but also to those who back China’s policies on matters such as the Uyghur genocide and the Hong Kong protests. A recent study by Petterson portrays tankies as: “regard[ing] past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.”
Just pathetic. What is this CIA-ass website? I've never seen or heard of it before.
Anyway, extremism is when you take a principled stance against verifiable, undeniable genocide
They often opt to use the nomenclature ‘Communist Party of China (CPC)’—Beijing’s preferred language—over the more colloquial ‘CCP’ [...] Overall, there’s a clear inclination in tankies’ dialogues towards viewpoints aligned with the CCP (or CPC in their vocabulary).
Brain legitimately spilling out of their ears.
We find the tankies’ usage of ‘Zelensky’ aligns with the r/DemocraticSocialism’s usage of ‘Trump’. This parallel suggests a certain scepticism or opposition towards Ukrainian sovereignty within the tankie community.
Wow! I had no idea it suggested this. Care to explain why opposition to a Western puppet who shakes the hands of Nazis and wears their merchandise means scepticism/opposition towards Ukrainian sovereignty (in a data-driven way)? Of course not. The "parallel" drawn is so shallow and meaningless. "This subreddit doesn't like Trump, these people don't like Zelensky, waow is there a common link here in that both of these groups don't like separate people?" And then nothing is done with this comparison?? Filling the word count to the brim.
If I actually wrote something this bad and shallow I would at least forget to put my real name on it.
more colloquial to who? more colloquial to WHO, motherfucker??more colloquial
Libs love to (correctly) bring up that Republicans made a point to refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, solely because it sounds worse. They will then turn around and laugh at the idea of using the CPC's correct name.
If you don't call a square a triangle you're an extremist sweetie.
They needed to build off of the word association with the CCCP otherwise people wouldn't get mad enough on their own.
These are the same people who scream at you if you spell it Kiev
To be honest there is a lot of overlap between Zelensky and Trump, and certainly in their vibes and energy which is something that liberal should spot immediately since their analysis are based just on those (though they also miss those often).
Rather than highlighting concerns over detention and genocide, they portray the situation in a less severe light, e.g.:
Go back to watching Vaush
This is the person calling you a tankie
God, is that one of the swords from SAO?! Abjectly shit taste. If you're gonna pose with a fictional blade, dude coulda picked like. Rebellion, Frostmourne, Ryuko's Scissor-blade, one of the 40 or 50 designs of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur; and this jagoff picks the single lamest protag's single lamest blade? HE COULD'VE EVEN PICKED TRUNKS' NONDESCRIPT-ASSED SWORD, Z-ERA OR SUPER-ERA AND I WOULDN'T BE ROASTING HIM LIKE THIS!
Such trash taste omfg.
That is 100% the sword from the SAO protagonist, and between this and including
Acceptance of CCP Narratives
Go back to watching Vaush.
I am extremely suspicious of mr assistant professor
Someone start a GoFundMe to get this dweeb a LoZ Master Sword
Froustmorne is based, Zoro's katanas would be lit, demon slayer blades are crazy, zanpaktos are awesome, shard blades are sick. Light sabers are a classic. Practical HEMA swords are neat. Your local blacksmith likes to make swords.
Homie chose SAO?????
I know bullying is wrong and bad... but can we please bully him?
lemmygrad is so back as the big scary tankie on the fediverse woooo
Honestly it feels like we're swapping up with Hexbear every six months
explores online spaces where modern tankies gather and spread their extremist ideology
I am vomittting extremistly.
Fucking nazi fucks. Imagine thinking GenZedong is extreme. The liberal encounters someone with beliefs and convictions. They cannot comprehend it. Their world shatters in to a kaleidescope of possibility. Horrified, shaken, they cling to the only thing they know; change is impossible and anyone who wants to change anything is insane and evil.
Our light shines in the darkness; and the darkness understands it not
GOOD reference.
lol the only way that they'd get away with this is if liberals try to convince everyone that class discrimination against the rich is bigotry on the level of racism or sexism. I guess they've already tried this. Hexbear was created after reddit banned violent rhetoric against slave owners.
They'd have to set up a framework where wanting a violent revolution against the capitalists is extremist, but calmly rationally talking about the need to evict poor people from their homes isn't extremist.
They'd have to set up a framework where wanting a violent revolution against the capitalists is extremist, but calmly rationally talking about the need to evict poor people from their homes isn't extremist.
They already have this part down
New political compass dropped
Nobody worth their oxygen has ever posted a graph like this unironically. Completely unreadable
don't know what BunkerTube is, but if it's a subreddit devoted to a growing movement of vaguely Hoxha-aligned video essayists that would be lovely.
It made me think of the spryograph art set I had when I was a kid.
Networks are notoriously difficult to visualize. All you can really say with a chart like this is "we have graph data". I'm reading through the actual paper now.
Dune heads get in here. New map of the Golden Path just dropped.
liberals: IM NOT OWNED IM SO DIFFERENT THAN A CONSERVATIVE
It's like they got a toddler to scribble crayons on some paper and then just threw labels wherever. More deranged than any nonsensical graph ever dreamt up.
At least it put a liberal on the right, where it belongs.
No Nazis on this map, though. Trash.
Their positioning, further to the left than subreddits like r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism
I like how they use informedtankie as their first example of a tankie space, then act like /r/communism and /r/socialism are somehow less so? All three literally share moderators, and have shared many former moderators who are now spread across hundreds of projects on the site.
It's so fucking badly researched. They know literally nothing about socialists or the fact that among marxists there's very little issue with "tankies". There is no separation or division. They seem to think that there is.
They'd have a fit if they realised Corbyn upholds AES, advertises the Black Panthers, or Dianne Abbot defends Mao on national tv, or John Mcdonnel waving around Mao's little red book in parliament. Like wtf do these people not know what marxists are? It's like they have literally never encountered actual socialists before and really only have a particularly vague understanding of any of this shit. I can't think of a single marxist figure in the mainstream (for a marxist) that wouldn't fit their definitions of "tankie" if they ever actually inquired as to what any given marxist believes. The only real difference between any of us is our position on China diverging between ML, Trot and Maoists, which isn't really that divisive at all.
The only group that anyone really has any beef with are the gonzaloites.
they have literally never encountered actual socialists before and really only have a particularly vague understanding of any of this shit
This was me until I was like 25 years old - though in my defense I wasn't writing news articles about them.
Data science is easy when you can just ignore relevant data that disagrees with your predetermined result.
Utkucan Balci (@utkucanbalci) is a Ph.D. Candidate at Binghamton University and a student researcher at iDRAMA (The International Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis) Lab. His current research interests include understanding online communities and how they break up into more divergent subcommunities.
Michael Sirivianos (@msirivia) Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and Informatics and the Dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at the Cyprus University of Technology. He serves on the Board of the CYENS Centre of Excellence and researches ways to help social media users tell lies apart. His research interests include the trust-aware design of distributed systems, device-centric authentication, federated identity management, discrimination based on personal data, cyber safety, transactional workload scalability, and measurement of blockchain systems
Jeremy Blackburn (@jhblackb) is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Binghamton University. Jeremy is broadly interested in data science, with a focus on large-scale measurements and modelling. His award-winning research into understanding toxic behaviour, hate speech, and fringe and extremist Web communities has been covered in the press by The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Infowars, among others.
Assuming at least the last two of these people are libertarians who think the left is the real menace to be worried about. Imagine putting in your bio that your work has been covered by fucking Infowars.
work has been covered by fucking Infowars.
phrenology... on the blockchain
"The gang confirms all their biases and proves that everything they want to believe is true"
"Anercho"-capitalism, the ideology for business school incels, is closer to feminism than to Objectivism (a synonym for "anarcho"-capitalism).
This makes sense. I'm a very serious big boy data driven think tank thinker.
When a think tank is afraid of plagiarizing the political compass.
Are those supposed to be subreddits?
Wonder why they couldn’t get their paper published in an actual journal
tankies appear to be deeply invested in state-driven political events, often at the expense of grassroots societal issues.
In an article published on a "think tank" with ties to the State Department and which broadcasts imperialist propaganda against enemy states.
The paper is bad and incoherent. For a supposedly data driven paper it's mostly about the authors' subjective experiences and a selection of anecdotal-grade posts. The few graphs they do choose are unintelligible and aren't even used to support any particular arguments. It'd be a sweet gig to work for a think tank like this where you can just write garbage and collect your NED/oligarch-backed check, but I have a little bit of self-respect.
I thought papers were bad in my field but boy does political science produce some absolute slop
So far, it feels like every poli sci hack I've ever met is really just a failed sociologist
In some of the war oriented think tanks, you literally just play board games with a bunch of non military business people and call it “war simulation/ war gaming” lol. As if a bunch of lanyards have more meaningful insight into war and logistics than billionaire dollar military exercises and tactics, most of which are already delusional nonsense to begin with.
The authors probably started their paper after they saw pigpoopballs.
I am not upset: a data-driven analysis
"Frequently target muslims and jews in their posts" (another unfounded assertion from the data guys)
I don't call myself a tankie, I don't call myself anything other than leftist/socialist...but I've seriously never seen any of that here or on the left wing subreddits. I wish they would show the data on the Antisemitic or Islamophobic posts in these tankie spaces. They have the charts and graphs for every other less egregious claim.
I haven't looked at their methodology but I'm gonna guess that expressing doubt over a genocide in Xinjiang qualifies as Islamophobic, and anti-Zionism qualifies as antisemitic. I have no idea. One time I got called antisemitic on Twitter in 2020 because I said Chabad people in NYC should probably stop having those weddings where 500 people show up because there's a pandemic and no one at those things wears a mask.
If you can't differentiate a right wing criticism of Israel from a left wing one your data isn't worth the bits and bytes used to make it. If you think we criticize isntreal more than 4chan you're out of your goddamn mind
Lemmygrad dunked on this a couple weeks ago: https://hexbear.net/post/1900390
The actual whitepaper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.06981.pdf
Hey no biggie everyone gets a chance to laugh. Thanks for the links
Lemmygrad dunked on this a couple weeks ago: https://hexbear.net/post/1900390
The actual whitepaper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.06981.pdf
We also dunked on it months ago:
So did Hexbear: https://hexbear.net/post/279191
oh yeah, extremist and dangerous rhetoric from the left! They're against expanding the war in ukraine that might kill us all! They disagree with the butchery in Palestine! oh so dangerous, especially since they have ZERO power in existing governance in ANY western country.
remember to call you congressman and demand the blood of the world's underclass!
"data driven understanding" basically means "I forcefed oatmeal into a VCR "
End result is slop either way
Are liberals so bored they start assigning numerical values to how sad they feel about forum posts? Or is this the liberal tendency to attempt neutrality or sound unbiased? "Sweetie, your post calling me a "Zionist bootlicker" scores really high on Toxicity and Personal_Threat. If you're not careful I might have to increase your Antisemitism ranking."
Can't liberals actually respond to leftists without pretending we're a sociological pathogen to be dissected and monitored
Can’t liberals actually respond to leftists without pretending we’re a sociological pathogen to be dissected and monitored
Nope, they're not even past phrenology, malthusian 'thought', and 'white man's burden' yet; and appear incapable of moving past those.
When dumbass stemlords say sociology isnt a science (it is) this is what they're thinking of
It's funny that they have the word "understanding" in the title even though they demonstrate zero understanding of anything
I love those network graph filler images. I can just scribble on a piece of paper for 15 minutes, label some dots, and it would have about as much information contained therein for the reader.
me missing the days in school when I would get my turn to play with the spyrograph
Did we get mentioned by name again?
tragically, no, only genzedong and lemmygrad.ml
Tankies’ move not only made them dominant voices on Lemmygrad.ml but also seemed to amplify the overall toxic tone on the platform.
Well the methodology and the superficial character of the paper indicates this is a bachelor's thesis at most. Fun to dunk on but otherwise entirely irrelevant no?
if only academic rigor and methodology were major determinants for what becomes relevant, and things weren't signal boosted solely for their political ramifications in an existing superstructure
Finally finished looking over this.
Hasan isn't mentioned a single time. Kind of weird.
Is this the one where this site alone skewed the results?
This article's research is so dated it appears to be from right around GenZedong's quarantine, and the researchers did superficial research, saw a couple links to the Grad in GZD and that was the only lemmyverse site they visited, as an afterthought.
another MAGA maggot guns down 20 migrants at the border after downloading "great replacement theory" directly into his brain for 8 years straight, directly from mainstream news networks: i sleep
someone posts pig poop balls: REAL SHIT
ya gotta give it to libs
when they write, its incredible how every sentence becomes worse than the last
edit:
GENZEDONG MENTION ALL HAIL THE KING
GenZedong lived, GenZedong lives, GenZedong will live
left-wing extremism remains a relatively unexplored domain
Oh, no! Someone should get on this.
tankies are on the periphery of the far-left
I prefer to think of it as being on the cutting-edge.
very good paper, well done