"Research" by US university says lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website

Honestly I could have told them the history of Lemmygrad myself, no need for machine learning and data-driven APIs, you could just ask somebody lol. Can I get some of that 500k?

What if they've been here, asking all along, and we've been shoo-ing them off as libs?

Can someone please explain "...more Stalinist than Leninist" because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish

Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR "managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs" he is known for his "... comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China ..." and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,

"We perform a set of quantitative analyses that reveal the relationship between tankies, other far-left communities, leftists, feminists, and capitalists." I feel I need no more explination, the bold was added by me

At this point I am less than a page in and I feel like I am reading too far into this but I am comitted to this and I will read and review this ... and likely reply to here... but this looks to be the dumbest acidemic paper I have ever read, ever, and trust me I have read some really stupid ones

Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR “managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs” he is known for his “… comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China …” and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,

You can find the source on libgen. Here's the sources for the preface:

1 Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff, ‘Xinjiang Authorities Sending Uyghurs to Work in China’s Factories, Despite Coronavirus Risks,’ Radio Free Asia (27 February 2020).

2 SCMP Reporters, ‘China Plans to Send Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang Re-Education Camps to Work in Other Parts of Country,’ South China Morning Post (2 May 2020).

3 Keegan Elmer, ‘China says it will ‘Normalise’ Xinjiang Camps as Beijing Continues Drive to Defend Policies in Mainly Muslim Region,’ South China Morning Post (9 December 2019).

4 Erkin, ‘Boarding Preschools For Uyghur Children “Clearly a Step Towards a Policy of Assimilation”: Expert,’ Radio Free Asia (6 May 2020).

5 Gulchehre Hoja, ‘Subsidies For Han Settlers “Engineering Demographics” in Uyghur-Majority Southern Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia (13 April 2020).

So... SCMP and RFA.

And the first ten sources for the introduction:

1 Emily Feng, ‘China Targets Muslim Uyghurs Studying Abroad,’ Financial Times (1 August 2017).

2 See Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (14 March 2017); Magha Rajagopalan, ‘This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,’ Buzzfeed News (17 October 2017).

3 Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (21 September 2017).

4 Nathan VanderKlippe, ‘Frontier Injustice: Inside China’s Campaign to “Re-educate” Uyghurs,’ The Globe and Mail (9 September 2017); HRW, ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’ (10 September 2017); Eset Sulaiman, ‘China Runs Region-wide Re-education Camps in Xinjiang for Uyghurs and Other Muslims,’ RFA (11 September 2017).

5 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘China’s Reeducation Camps are Beginning to Look Like Concentration Camps,’ Vox (24 October 2018).

6 See ‘Inside the Camps Where China Tries to Brainwash Muslims Until They Love the Party and Hate Their Own Culture,’ Associated Press (17 May 2018); David Stavrou, ‘A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on Inside,’ Haaretz (17 October 2019).

7 See Amie Ferris-Rotman, ‘Abortions, IUDs and Sexual Humiliation: Muslim Women who Fled China for Kazakhstan Recount Ordeals,’ Washington Post (5 October 2019); Eli Meixler, ‘“I Begged Them to Kill Me.” Uighur Woman Tells Congress of Torture in Chinese Internment Camps,’ TIME (30 November 2018); Ben Mauk, ‘Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State,’ The Believer (1 October 2019).

8 Shoret Hoshur ‘Nearly Half of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Hotan Targetted for Re-education Camps,’ RFA (9 October 2017).

9 Sean R. Roberts, ‘Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century,’ Fair Observer (17 December 2018).

10 See Zenz and Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State.’

Zenz, RFA, and Financial Times.

Not exactly promising.
- If i turned in something like this to my proff with those sorces, I would be down listed a grade minum. I cannot belive that passes as research.
- It’s like Whack-A-mole with all those bozos.
- Also Vox, a zionist cumrag, and some artsy cumrag that screams "CIA money"
Can someone please explain “…more Stalinist than Leninist” because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish

This is trotskyist political view, considering how much time they spent agitating, it was somewhat accepted by the radlib part of mainstream. Btw. it's telling how of entire ton of trotskist propaganda mainstream accepted exactly the anti-AES parts.
and capitalists

Do you think they know that we all work at three-letter agencies? I thought we'd kept that quite secret but maybe someone has been blabbing?
- HUSH YOUR GOING TO BLOW OUR COVER!!!! how are we suposed to get the commies at hexbear to trust us if you blab right before they fedderate?

Whoever the people are that got their comments published on page 33 and 34 deserve a special flair (does Lemmy have those?)

Also, it's so funny how the authors keep calling the Communist Party of China the CCP instead of the CPC. For table 10 they had to switch between these keywords because the tankies community is the only one that can get the acronym right LMAO

I almost appreciate the CCP/CPC thing, because it gives me a shorthand as to know whether the upcoming argument will have any merit or just be bullshit.

I still look at their actual argument on their merits, but 95% of the time it has gone exactly the way I expected.
- We got our own little shibboleth
"That’s Isntreal and nah, we don’t endorse Israel." an example of a statement that proves we are evil

and did you not read the paper, us using the correct accronym just proves we are brainwashed by chinese propganda... by assertion
- Oh yeah, we use the cHinESe gOveRnMenT's PrEFeRrEd nOmeNClaTurE, so we're misaligned. What a joke. It'd be like calling the USA the AUS and insisting that everyone who gets it right has been manipulated by the US government. Sorry, the SU government.

holy shit you weren't joking, if you ctrl+f lemmygrad we appear in it lmao

edit: I still can't believe this is real, which one of you wrote this paper??

We made it comrades, we're going to get banned from flights
- no but it's the funniest thing, it was written by 2 randos from some backwater uni in new york state (not the city), and a third co-author from Cyprus (??? why), and published on arxiv.org which is:
  
  a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,294,594 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
  
  Meaning they found whoever would publish them without asking questions.
  
  Like this thing says the word tankie 71 times, which is an average of 2.5 per page, of course they would not have been published anywhere else lol. If I was their uni honestly I would give these students a talking to because it would reflect really badly on my reputation to let them publish this drivel.

I think I'll actually review the paper. Because I think it'll make a great use-case for the argument that you can't automated-sentiment-analysis your way to a cogent political assessment of entire populations. No matter how hard you want to.

A review of the paper. I'll try and update this as I go.

Abstract

Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring left-wing extremism.

Perhaps there is a reason that most of the research on extremism finds itself looking at right-wing examples.

Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an organized response to deplatforming events.

"Relatively high toxicity" screams horseshoe theory. What and/or who the extremists are "being toxic" about matters, not merely that they "are toxic." (Spoiler alert: far-left "extremists" score very high on being "toxic" about fascists and fascism; not exactly a novel observation)

Introduction

The use of social media by extremists is well documented in the press [ 4, 23, 108 ] and has been a heavy focus of the research community [7 , 46, 75 ]. However, almost all recent work has studied right- wing extremists. This concentration can be attributed to several factors. The growing popularity of research on populism, as a result of the increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders globally [ 106 ], has led to a greater abundance of identifiable right-wing extremists online and their substantial impact on society. At the same time, there has been a steady rise in political rhetoric characterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists, scapegoating the far-left for violent activities (e.g., claiming Antifa orchestrated the January 6th Insurrection [ 15], accusing far-left extremists of planning and organizing violence during protests after George Floyd’s death [ 31], and blaming left-wing extremists for setting forest fires in Oregon [51]).

Comparing "increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders" to "a steady rise in political rhetoric charcterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists" is not the comparison the authors think it is. "Actually existing far-right parties and leaders" aren't in the same ballpark as "some people say that some other people are far-left." Further, this doesn't state where that political rhetoric is coming from. So I checked the sources:

15 is: "Tommy Beer. 2021. The antifa lie: Conservative lawmakers, pundits push a baseless claim that leftists were behind Capitol Insurrection. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/07/the-antifa-lie-conservative-lawmakers-pundits-push-a-baseless-claim-that-leftists-were-behind-capitol-insurrection/?sh=227140324b8d"

31 is: "Miranda Devine. 2020. Nationwide George Floyd riots are the price of liberalism: Devine. https://nypost.com/2020/05/31/george-floyd-riots-are-the-price-of-liberalism-devine/"

51 is: "Margot Harris. 2020. Joe Rogan apologized for spreading misinformation about Oregon fires amid Spotify employee backlash. https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-rogan-spotify-apology-oregon-forest-fires-antifa-left-activists-2020-9"

Lo and behold, the "other side" of the far-right extremism coin is... the far-right complaining about the far-left.

many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well. For example, spreading mis- and disinformation from unreputable or overtly biased sources [ 122 ].

That "or" is doing some heavy leg work to try and equivocate between "unreputable" and "overtly biased" sources. Let's see what source 122 is about:

122 is: "Richard Stengel. 2020. Domestic disinformation is a growing menace to America. https://time.com/5860215/domestic-disinformation-growing-menace-america/"

And some choice quotes from the article:

Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals.

...

China has now entered the disinformation game in a big way, aggressively seeking to fix blame for the epidemic on the U.S. and it has been regularly highlighting American missteps in coping with the virus.

...

The Super Bowl of disinformation will undoubtedly be the 2020 election. All of the malign actors, the Russians, white extremists, China and Iran will get in on the game.

...

Disinformation created by American fringe groups—white nationalists, hate groups, antigovernment movements, left-wing extremists—is growing.

These are the only quotes in the source that could conceivably have some way of bolstering the claim that "many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well." The first is the closest that comes to support. Alas, it doesn't apply because "partisan liberals" aren't far-left. The next two could only conceivably "apply" in a very hand-wavy "China = far-left" sense (which, as we'll see later, the authors make liberal use of). The last is merely a re-stating of of the claim without supporting evidence.

Not a good start.

Despite the impact of right-wing online extremists, political rhetoric, and a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists, there are essentially no studies of the far-left on social media, let alone far-left extremists.

I think this might be a misprint? As in, it was supposed to read "despite the impact of left-wing online extremists." Because structurally the sentence doesn't make sense otherwise. And also, there is no citation given for "a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists" either. Which is odd, because there are examples you can dig for and cite within the United States, a la the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

We focus primarily on a large left-wing community known as tankies. Historically, tankies were supporters of hardline Soviet actions [43 ]; more Stalinist than Leninist. The name originates from Soviets using tanks to put down rebellions in eastern Europe [ 34, 50 , 94 , 100 , 105 , 107].

The definition is crude but in the ballpark, excluding the "Stalinist" jab, given that Stalin died in 1953, the Hungarian uprising was in 1956, and Khrushchev was not at all a fan of his predecessor Stalin. Curiously, the authors already are aware of this distinction (Appendix C Misalignment Analysis):

Nonetheless, in cases where keywords possess polarized or disparate meanings, we partition them for specific interpretations within certain communities (e.g., when validating the Stalinist leaning of tankies, we do not put “Khrushchev” and “Stalin” in the same keyword list).

Perhaps different parts of this paper were written in isolation by each of the authors. In any event...

Examining the sources:

43 is (libgen link): "Marion Glastonbury. 1998. Children of the Revolution: matters arising. Changing English 5, 1 (1998), 7–16."

34 is (libgen link): "Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks. 2019. Anti-fascism/Art/Theory: An introduction to what hurts us. , 271–292 pages."

50 is (online source): "John Harris. 2015. Marxism today: the forgotten visionaries whose ideas could save Labour. The Guardian 29 (2015)"

94 is (libgen link): "Christina Petterson. 2020. Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies. Brill research perspectives in biblical interpretation 4, 1 (2020), 1–80."

100 is (libgen link): "Neil Redfern. 2014. No Friends to the Left: The British Communist Party’s Surveillance of the Far Left, c. 1932–1980. Contemporary British History 28, 3 (2014), 341–360."

105 is (libgen link): "Emily Robinson. 2011. New times, new politics: History and memory during the final years of the CPGB. British Politics 6, 4 (2011), 453–478."

107 is (libgen link): "Raphael Samuel. 1987. Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part (III). New Left Review 1 (1987), 165."

That is actually a healthy listing of sources. I may or may not come back to review each of them in turn. I've been at this for several hours now :) (TODO)
- More recently, tankies have grown to support the actions of the CCP in China, a currently operational actually existing socialist (AES) country.
  
  Using "CCP" instead of "CPC" is a telling choice of terminology. One that they consistently use throughout the paper until they have to examine "tankie subreddits" specifically later, and find themselves needing to use the correct "CPC" version for misalignment analysis (Tables 4, 10), as well as:
  
  The first indication this is true from our misaligmment analysis is tankies’ use of the Chinese government’s preferred nomenclature of Communist Party of China (CPC) [ 22, 73 , 93] instead of the more commonly used western term CCP.
  
  Moving on...
  
  Notably, their support can extend beyond just AES countries, often siding with or excusing anti-NATO, non-socialist, autocratic regimes, including Putin-controlled Russia’s actions [ 24 , 35].
  
  I mean, at least the authors recognize that Russia is "non-socialist." And it is true that socialists of varying stripes are against NATO, not just "tankies."
  
  Examining the sources:
  
  24 is: "Roane Carey. 2022. Don’t Be a Tankie: How the Left Should Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. The Intercept (Mar 2022). https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-leftists-tankie/"
  
  35 is: "Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła. 2022. Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine. Foreign Policy (Jul 2022). https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/"
  
  These sources faithfully recount the fact that Marxist-Leninists ("tankies") are not uncritically accepting NATO's framing of the war. Using the Foreign Policy article as an example:
  
  Meanwhile, many on the progressive left—including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the politicians they support, left-wing academics and essayists, and swaths of self-proclaimed online “anti-imperialists”—have tended to side with the aggressor, Russia (or at least not side with the victim, Ukraine) in one of the clearest examples of colonial aggression in recent memory. Their primary arguments mirror those of the right—NATO expansion and Russia’s legitimate security concerns as a trigger for the war as well as the misuse of funds that could be used to solve domestic problems—but they also express opposition to war full stop and, sometimes, espouse outright support for Russia, all wrapped in language of opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, often construed as “U.S. imperialism.”
  
  There has always been a fringe minority of voices on the far left that have been pejoratively labeled “tankies.” Often self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, they have been apologists for the repressive actions of authoritarian communist governments, such as those of the Soviet Union or China. The insult was originally hurled by fellow leftists at the Western communists who cheered as the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest to repress a popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Today, the term is mostly tossed around in online circles, referring to supporters of repressive regimes and applying primarily to the opinions held by fringe journalists working for opaquely funded alternative news sources who praise dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
  
  The article stretches hard to say that horseshoe theory is real and its basis is a yearning for populism, but it is a decent read at least for getting inside the mind of someone who considers themselves not on either end of an extreme. If nothing else, it does support the authors' contention that "tankies" -- though of course, other socialists as well -- are anti-NATO. A contention that I don't think anyone here would object to.
  
  Regardless of their historical tactics, tankies have recently shown behavior similar to the right-wing extremists (e.g., denying the Uyghur genocide [104]).
  
  104 is (libgen link): "Sean R Roberts. 2020. The war on the Uyghurs. In The war on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press."
  
  The "Uyghur genocide" narrative has been debunked ad naseum. Denying the "Uyghur genocide" is in no way comparable to denying actual genocide. But for the sake of completeness, user /u/ComradePubIvy has already taken a peek at the source:
  
  Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR “managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs” he is known for his “… comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China …” and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,
  
  And in the "NOTES" section of this book, here are the sources given for its preface:
  
  1 Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff, ‘Xinjiang Authorities Sending Uyghurs to Work in China’s Factories, Despite Coronavirus Risks,’ Radio Free Asia (27 February 2020).
  
  2 SCMP Reporters, ‘China Plans to Send Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang Re-Education Camps to Work in Other Parts of Country,’ South China Morning Post (2 May 2020).
  
  3 Keegan Elmer, ‘China says it will ‘Normalise’ Xinjiang Camps as Beijing Continues Drive to Defend Policies in Mainly Muslim Region,’ South China Morning Post (9 December 2019).
  
  4 Erkin, ‘Boarding Preschools For Uyghur Children “Clearly a Step Towards a Policy of Assimilation”: Expert,’ Radio Free Asia (6 May 2020).
  
  5 Gulchehre Hoja, ‘Subsidies For Han Settlers “Engineering Demographics” in Uyghur-Majority Southern Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia (13 April 2020).
  
  And here are the first ten sources for its introduction:
  
  1 Emily Feng, ‘China Targets Muslim Uyghurs Studying Abroad,’ Financial Times (1 August 2017).
  
  2 See Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (14 March 2017); Magha Rajagopalan, ‘This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,’ Buzzfeed News (17 October 2017).
  
  3 Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (21 September 2017).
  
  4 Nathan VanderKlippe, ‘Frontier Injustice: Inside China’s Campaign to “Re-educate” Uyghurs,’ The Globe and Mail (9 September 2017); HRW, ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’ (10 September 2017); Eset Sulaiman, ‘China Runs Region-wide Re-education Camps in Xinjiang for Uyghurs and Other Muslims,’ RFA (11 September 2017).
  
  5 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘China’s Reeducation Camps are Beginning to Look Like Concentration Camps,’ Vox (24 October 2018).
  
  6 See ‘Inside the Camps Where China Tries to Brainwash Muslims Until They Love the Party and Hate Their Own Culture,’ Associated Press (17 May 2018); David Stavrou, ‘A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on Inside,’ Haaretz (17 October 2019).
  
  7 See Amie Ferris-Rotman, ‘Abortions, IUDs and Sexual Humiliation: Muslim Women who Fled China for Kazakhstan Recount Ordeals,’ Washington Post (5 October 2019); Eli Meixler, ‘“I Begged Them to Kill Me.” Uighur Woman Tells Congress of Torture in Chinese Internment Camps,’ TIME (30 November 2018); Ben Mauk, ‘Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State,’ The Believer (1 October 2019).
  
  8 Shoret Hoshur ‘Nearly Half of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Hotan Targetted for Re-education Camps,’ RFA (9 October 2017).
  
  9 Sean R. Roberts, ‘Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century,’ Fair Observer (17 December 2018).
  
  10 See Zenz and Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State.’
  
  RFA, SCMP, Zenz, et. al. Not exactly reliable sources.
If I can help let me know, I am less than 4 pages in and this is already the worst paper I have ever read, somehow doing worse than the paper I read saying that renewables will never succeed because a solar field takes up more space than a coal powered power plant.
- It's a grift on supposed support for "data-driven" analyses. It's just a specultive opinion piece. Its data handling and analysis is anything but academic.
Please, do! It gets so tiring seeing all of those AI data "scientists" believing they can say whatever they want about fields they know jack about because "the p-value is low." They're the biggest reason I decided to quit.
- Are you saying a data science major lets me write a paper that calls theirs BS because the p-value is low?
Since you are reading it, what is the ranking in the screenshot based on?
- Since you are reading it, what is the ranking in the screenshot based on?
  
  So far, on the arxiv page, no data or source code have been provided alongside the paper. I'd expect jupyter journals, or something like that at least, for reproducibility. Perhaps they will be added later or they are provided in a URL within the paper that I have not yet read.
  
  In any case, the screenshot is of Table 11, and it is found in Appendix D, Domain Analysis:
  
  We examine the differences in the popularity of domains between tankies and their similar ideologies in this section. This analysis will also help us to understand if there are any platforms specifically used by tankies. We first look for the popular domains shared by tankies to have a better understanding of the further results in this section.
  
  Popular Domains Shared By Tankies. We detect 146,078 URLs from 7,049 different domains (including suffixes) tankies share. Table 11 shows top 20 domains shared by tankies after removing top 1,000 globally most visited domains by Majestic [ 74]. From the table, we see online Marxist/Marxist-Leninist hubs (marxist.org and workers.today), American left-wing alternative news sources (thegrayzone.com, peoplesworld.org, and foreignpolicy.com), and the web page of the Communist Party USA (cpusa.org), a Venezuelan alternative news source (telesurenglish.net), a British far-left alternative news site (newworker.org), a Reddit-like Marxist-Leninist platform (lemmygrad.ml), Chinese news outlets (cgtn.com and globaltimes.cn), and Chinese far-left platforms (redsails.org and qiaocollective.com).
  
  Describing foreignpolicy.com as left-wing is an example of miscategorization by the authors, as is calling redsails.org a "Chinese far-left platform." Neither of these are accurate statements, and they undercut trust that the authors are correctly and thoroughly labeling and interpreting their data. Between this and other glaring oversights in Table 12 -- which purports that domains like "redditsave.com," "ko-fi.com," "twimg.com," and "archive.is" are "representative domains of tankies" specifically and supposedly not heavily found in other similar far-left communities (as per the authors' description of the Tf-Idf algorithm and their motivation for its use) -- there is a compelling case that the authors (1) do not themselves possess a sufficient level of understanding of left-wing ideology -- much less Marxist-Leninist ideology -- to label it accurately, and (2) may have been sloppy with their data analysis (though this can't be definitively known without access to the underlying datasets and analytics source code).
  
  74 is: "Majestic. 2022. Majestic. https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million"
  
  Majestic is described on the cited URL as: "The million domains we find with the most referring subnets." Basically, of the 7,049 different domains contained in the 146,078 URLs the authors found in their crawl, remove any that are found in the top 1,000 domains as defined by Majestic. Domains like google.com, facebook.com, reddit.com (whether or not the authors recognize the potential problem with excluding that particular result from the table is unknown at this point; I have not finished reviewing the paper).
- What of the many rankings? The website ranking?
- I thought it was based on how many times the website was mentioned. That’s how Reddit-save and foreign policy are too.

Hexbear also found this: https://www.hexbear.net/post/279191

Also I'd like to think I did my part getting lemmygrad's numbers up as I was spamming Genzedong with a macro telling people to go here as a lifeboat before and after the quarantine.

Also I love how they didn't connect us to the only real anti-pedophile podcast subreddit (Brace noises) or thedeprogram, guess we don't have that many casual links but if they checked overlap it should be there. Sloppy work on that in addition to all the problems with methodology, definitions, etc. Hilarious tax dollars paid for this though I guess I'd prefer it over actually effort-driven papers and even better it might encourage other lazy anti-communists to cite them, creating a chain of weak links back to a shoddy base that can be knocked away in heavy discourse and leave anti-communists flailing and drifting. Of course the downside is actual policy isn't driven by hard peer reviewed science and part of the purpose of a shoddy paper like this could be to give a cite-able pretext to say private companies on why they need to immediately censor "tankies" and any discourse that their shoddy, shitty, "ai-data-'science'" says is related to that.

I like their idea, we should read the article and make it a tankie article

simply epic

“fucking cooldownbot”

Somebody’s worried. Let me know when a “left-wing extremist” shoots up a school or invades the capitol. All they did was give me a list of websites to visit.

Not just websites, we'll even recommend books for you to read! Truly, we are the greatest evil.
- Nice try FBI, you know I can’t read. /s

we did it boys, soon we are officially on the FBI watch list

I’ve assumed since Snowden that the NSA knows who we are.
Feels good achieving your dreams.
One of the highest honors the US can give.

TO THE MOON

INVEST NOW
- As an anarchist, I'm betting on a short (yes I own stocks, it funds the revolution, you tankies would do this too if you were actually socialists like me and realised the revolution doesnt come from your well wishes and online posting). As more and more people realies how tankeis are actually not socialists but authoritarian red fascists, they will naturally abandon this label and it will plummet in the graph. its just human anture.
We are da bestest stonks.

(An aside: I'm thoroughly impressed with the amount of uncoordinated, ad-hoc, impromptu -- and yet rigorous -- dunking and researching that is going on in this post)

Some would say its more rigorous, and more researching than when into the whole paper.... and if anyone is wondering, yes I am part of the some
We really owe it to the researcher for making themselves so easy to dunk on. My favorite to add to the list:

"there being stories of r/GenZedong users attacking Uyghurs and promoting violence against them in the press [ 27],"

which leads to this infamous source:

[27] Andrew R. Chow. 2022. Reddit failing to control hate speech on Global Forums: Mods. https://time.com/6121915/reddit-international-hate-speech/

Dunking on the Rushan Abbas AMA = attacking Uyghurs. Filter that narrative through enough reports and citations of articles citing reports that cite articles and you have the Truth™.
- Best part is they'll eventually ban Genzedong, remove/scrub that reddit thread and random online haters (same variety making ridiculous claims about Lemmy's devs) will begin to claim the removed reddit sources actually were proof of actual genzedong users actually physically attacking Uyghurs.
  
  It's almost inevitable with the game of telephone they're playing. Just launder something enough time through enough sources while being vague and generous with words and it magically becomes fact to everyone but super serious and honest academics (e.g. not the type who write this garbage) who really don't impact the discourse at all anyways as if one discovered it and wrote anything at all it'd probably be a 1-2line citation in some voluminous work mostly unrelated to the fact, a total aside that they researched it and found it false, which obviously will never be seen by anyone.

Soon we will be more tankie than Marxists.org.

At that point I think we will effectivly be top of the list, the reddit archive site, if there was any real research done would not have been inclided

We gotta get prolewiki on there next.

Imagine a similar paper on the connection between white people and internet domains. Only instead referring to them as white people, the paper uses the term "cracker".

There would be hell tp pay for the author, and the paper would be just as funny
since arxiv will publish anything we could honestly write that paper ourselves lol

It's surreal to see the word "tankies" in something that claims to be an academic paper...

I'm glad that we're apparently so popular, though!

Cringe compilation: Apparently you can measure how toxic comments are on a graph. This says we are racist against almost every race besides Native Americans. It says Vaush isn't leftist (true) but then calls his subreddit "far-left."

My comments are so toxic that if you print them and ingest them you'll likely die.
Ah, yes, the Whites™ from Whiteland. Yeah, honestly, fuck those guys.
The part saying that they ‘observe that tankies attack the identities of Asians, Arabs, Hindus, Mexicans, Africans, and Whites in more than 20% posts mentioning these identities’ was what irritated me the most, because it is a serious accusation and yet it’s so poorly substantiated. (Notice how no quotes are given as examples.) It’s almost as if they relied on a computer programme to do all of their homework for them.
- I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What's more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that's indistinguishable from being mad at that group.
  
  Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don't align. They don't describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.
- After hearing about the lawyers who got disbarred for letting ChatGPT handle a case for them(and ended up citing like two or three cases that straight up didn't exist), I'm not 100% certain this isn't just transformer plagiarism.
- They did use a computer program to calculate "toxicity" and how threatening comments were: https://perspectiveapi.com/
What's the difference between toxicity and severe toxicity
- poisonous: if it bites you, you die
  
  toxic: if you bite it, you die
  
  severely toxic: my mother in law after a couple beers yes Dana I remember the christmas party
- It relies on this website to calculate both.
  
  The measurements still seem somewhat subjective. You can test how "toxic" comments are here: https://perspectiveapi.com/
next publication: "computation and assessing of the "meany badie nasty bad literaly made me cry" index of the lemmygrad comunity"

The whole thing just screams of "Fund me, daddy CIA!"

they where funded by the US government a little over half a million dollars
- Half a million for this is both hilarious and sad. On the one hand that could have funded several researchers doing actual science for the public benefit so it's a tragedy, on the other they grifted half a million dollars for what isn't even 50k of work IMO. I mean this is stuff that random hobbyists do in their free time in about a month or less and post on subreddits about data visualization for free.
  
  On the other hand money is not really an object when it comes to fighting the enemies of capital and empire so a small price to pay I'm sure. And better spent here (in their minds) than on researching actual hate groups and extremists like Nazis, channer-fash, alt-right, Qanon weirdos, etc which while it could be done to this caliber would obviously look a little lacking for the 500k considering there are private groups that do far better research on them and publish far better reports for far less money.

tankies focus more on state-level political events

In other words, the authors have no idea what they're talking about. We're abstracting to the level of classes, not states. Maybe they focused on the intellectually deprived western Marxist discourse.

Really did feel like a deliberate missing of the whole point, didn't it? Felt like a lot of their data stripped out any context that the posts they were 'analyzing' had; and drew deliberately-misleading takes from their sanitized data. Like, do you know any marxists who make a habit of attacking muslims? Meanwhile, most of the takedowns I see of Amerikans squawking about 'muh chingchang'(i've deadass heard a white person pronounce it that way; imagine these crackers actually learning how to pronounce 'Xinjiang') winds up boiling down to "Oh yeah, 'cause the country that spent fifteen years murdering muslims wholesale in the middle-east, and leaving depleted uranium in the sand to mutate their babies really cares about the Muslims in Xinjiang allasudden."
- Great points. If they bothered to do any actual analysis, though, they wouldn't have been able to reach the conclusion that we're extremists. "People who think the US should stop provoking and prosecuting wars that displace and kill millions" and "people who think children shouldn't starve" don't have the same ring as "far left extremism"; it wouldn't let them do the enlightened centrist, 'all extremes are bad'.
  
  Jfc, chingchang? They can't even hide their racism when their trying to pretend they're not racist. These will be the same people who depict Xi as Winnie the Pooh while criticising the CPC's approach to Xinjiang and pretend that they don't see the racist connotations. Wankers.
- Yeah, any paper worth its weight in flour would at the very least have an appendix with illustrative examples of the comments they find interesting or have "high toxicity". By just talking about all content in abstract with random asspull metrics they get to claim objectivity while presenting zero actual information. Typical for the kind of people who like to reduce countries to their GDP (per capita if you're lucky).
  
  Edit: I didn't notice that they actually did include some in their appendix after 5 pages with 135 citations. So much bloat and there's even a couple Washington Post articles there. They definitely didn't even read a lot of those beyond the abstract. Either way the examples are just strewn around in the text and did not include their "toxicity level" so the point still stands. Actually worst "qualitative analysis" I've ever read tbh, and that's usually already the worst in data science. More like "pseudoscientific cherrypicking".
Maybe they mean we talk more about imperialism and geopolitics than identity politics?
- The horror!!!!!

"Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinctdescription of tankie:

Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc. "

Yes, well recognized, the term is vague and can mean everything or nothing. It does not make sense. There are people who see only the Soviet Union as a successful workers' revolution, but not the rest. For some, China represents revisionism, so does Vietnam, or North Korea, or Cuba, etc. I've met people who are all about Enver Hoxha, everything else is revisionism. That is such an enormous range of different views, yet they are all tankies. I've witnessed Trotskyites beeing called tankies because they are against NATO.

To work with such a stupid definition is absolute nonsense. I myself have been called a tankie often enough, because I keep pointing out that the term has no substance in historical and political discourse. I even never discussed something political. Pointing out, that this term is stupid is enough to be a tankie - my experience.

The authors are not qualified to speak on this professionally seeing their degrees and expertise is in tech and computer science, not political science or philosophy.
- This exactly. This article is nothing but brainworm-inducing propaganda masquerading as "academic research" to seem more authoritative and valid.
- Yes, this is also a point. They still attempt to speak on this topic, because the write, that this paper is a "data-driven understanding" of "left-wing extremism". Absolute stupid
I don’t know how anyone can say “tankie” with a straight face, let alone publish a research paper about the “tankie” phenomenon.
- I can't believe they did this and then, by the looks of it, crowd-sourced a definition from reactionary corners of the fediverse. They're not giving western higher education a good name, are they?
current socialist systems

Stalin

Damn if only
- The Juche necromancers are trying their best, and that's all we can ask for.

Michael Sirivianos' grandpa took part in a right-wing extremist ultranationalist coup in Cyprus, which led to the Turkish invasion. He is suspected to be involved in a genocidal incident that was covered up. His uncle was a right-wing political leader and when he was the President of the Parliament in Cyprus, he was involved in the golden passports scandal (see this excellent Al Jazeera undercover report which initiated the investigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj18cya_gvw). His position in the University of Cyprus was "arranged" by his uncle when he was Parliament President.

"Umm actually sweeety, context is bad. You brainwashed tankie!"
Every single fucking time. Wonder if his "research colleagues" know of his background?
- I'd say they probably know of his affiliations. I dont think this sort of paper gets written "randomly". So-called disinformation experts are by and large state operators, and Western states have been fervent anticommunists since 1917.
this is misinformation. source: I made it up

Y'all are number one in my heart though. 🖤🖤🖤🖤

lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website

based

boy howdy, this """study""" entirely lacks an understanding of "tankie" positions.

We, according to them, are more toxic when talking about propaganda that's constantly pushed in our faces - often in conversations that had nothing to do with that propaganda. Gee, I wonder why that would be. Why would people who have to repeatedly explain anti-communism to anti-communists want to let off steam with like-minded people, who also have to deal with the same exact thing? Dumbass takes from this """study"""

Also, I'm betting the people who did this study are going to come find this post and use it to prove themselves right, but all they'll really prove is that they think it's the fault of the bees when a person gets stung after poking the nest.

hey admins can we keep this permanently pinned, it's so fucking funny

Or if we put the auto generating stuff back up, just quote mine from here
Honestly link it from the front page of prolewiki with just a laughing-pointing emoji next to it.

Hell yeah good job everybody

These are rookie numbers; gotta pump that up

Red Sails is pretty great.

i'm thinking about their claim that "the predominant topic of discussion" among tankies is the uyghur "genocide." like bro there's 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.

I have an idea about why they'd come to a weird conclusion like that:

A "hot" topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don't have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an "every day" topic.

Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.
Even then, most of the time, it's because someone comes along and says, "You claim that China has built railways but don't you know about Xinjiang, which means there can't be any semiconductors".
Tbh, I see more posts on here about the war in Ukraine than Xinjiang lately. We only ever talked about it because liberals were obsessed with creating a genocide narrative. Now that their short attention spans have moved on to the next act of dehumanization, why would we bother talking about something we know isn't real? The only reason we ever have to discuss half the mainstream topics about China is to deconstruct the myths around them.

Not that these "researchers" would know that.
- yeah, it's more in that vein of holodomor claims now, the arguments are mostly the same, there's nothing new to be gained from more posts about it

Not surprised to see that two of the three authors (not calling them scholars, this isn't scholarship) are from Binghamton University, considering their horrid reputation as of late. Anyone curious can read more here: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-history-professor-lawsuit-discrimination-and-retaliation-against-suny-binghamton-1234660025/

Good old McCarthyism

This is one of the most hilarious things I've seen all year. Also one of the most infuriating, as its such a shockingly poor work of "research". Imagine being an apparently legitimate professor who takes themselves seriously and putting your name on this, even as a grift this should be embarrassing.

that aside there are so many choice bits in here, true comedic genius

Why do they think we think all Jews are Zionists?

so like the pairs talk about Zionism and Israel and their conclusion is the complete opposite? That we target all Jews? Despite never using the word??
ISNTREAL 😎 🇵🇸

They really couldn't even bother filtering out words like "the" and "is"? Very informative data, clearly.
- As someone who did some natural language processing research in undergrad, they obviously have no idea what they're doing. To get meaningful data you need[^1] to remove words such as "the", "is", "it", etc. And that's not the only normalization you need to do.
  
  What's offensive for something claiming to be an academic paper is their lack of explanation of their data processing techniques. Meaningful conclusions can only be made if your data is reasonable. And to make sure you have meaningful data, especially when the source is extremely noisy human-generated online comments, you need to do several things to process your data before you can feed it into an analysis. The goal of publishing academic research is not only to publish a result, but to publish methodology to enable independent reproducibility: if you have the paper, and the data, you should be able to follow the methods and come to the same conclusions; if you can't, the paper's bad. Yes, these details are boring, and a lot of people will put them in an appendix instead of in the main body of the paper, but if you're being honest you do provide these details.
  
  They also don't even pretend to be objective; the paper reads more like a speculative opinion piece on sociology than it does a "data-driven" paper. Their assumptions drive their analysis and thus their conclusions. Moreover, when they attempt to make the distinction between TOXICITY and SEVERE_TOXICITY, they are not making these objective categories: the definitions they give are pure air and the distinction between the two categories is purely subjective.
  
  It's honestly an embarassment; I wouldn't want my name on a paper of such poor quality. I wouldn't want my university to be named on a paper of such poor quality (nor would I think the university would want themselves to be named on such a paper).
  
  Either these are genuinely ignorant undergrads who don't realize that they're producing wildly questionable and meaningless "research", or they're dishonest grifters taking federal taxpayer money[^2] and producing garbage.
  
  Being published in ArXiv is not automatically a bad thing; but it makes me wonder if they were rejected from peer-reviewed journals. There's no argument that they didn't want to or were unable to spend money to submit to a "real" journal since they are receiving outside funding.
  
  [^1]: Stopwords aren't totally useless at early stages in the pipeline or depending on what you're doing. For example, being grammatical terms they can help get a proper parse tree. But this type of analysis, sentiment analysis, is not using a full parse tree and the leaving in of stopwords only increases noise and decreases the ability of the model to produce meaningful results. [^2]: The researchers have received nearly a half a million $USD in federal taxpayer money through an NSF grant.
USSR, soviet, the, art, of

Nvivo is a comrade. Nice.

Edit, #10 is:

capitalism, yes, why, capitalist, yep

And tbf, this does about sum up most of our conversations.
Why is "the" listed 8 times? Do we really say the that much?
- We say thank you quite a lot though it seems
- Well, yes. But also, as long as most comments has "the" at least once, "the" will be listed.
  
  Orange gallbladder golfcart
- As most used word. If anything it shows how bad the compiling of the data is. "the" is basically white noise and they have not even filtered it out.
"inshallah" - I laughed harder than I should have.

"Chen" - The master gets his deserved mention, I see.

and lots of thanking - Very toxic, yes,yes.

I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.

It's quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.

I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I'll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as "positivist reductionism" is a "hard science guy" who thinks he^[1] doesn't have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because "numbers will tell me everything I need to know".

[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it's usually a guy.

I don't know if humanities could have salvaged some of this paper. They just make so many assumptions out of thin air and expect the reader to just go along with them, like this here:

The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions.

This is a specific claim, that in other words says "tankies support the Soviet Union, and as such they support the Russian Federation". But no source accompanies this claim, no definitions either, and ultimately the next sentence contradicts this claim -- they started from the conclusion, the starting point being them wanting to prove "Acceptence [sic] of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine" (yes the typo was originally there).

But the two are two entirely different claims, it does not logically follow that support for the USSR means support of Russia in the war. They just gloss over that though and start talking about their "word pairs" as if that proved anything lol

This is divination for computer scientists.

I've never written a scientific paper before but I would be ashamed to actually put this out for my peers to review.

Me reading this:

It sure is lovely that the "AI" "Revolution" has given hacks a bunch of hard to audit but scientific-sounding metrics for them to apply however they want.

Armchair peer review time: I'd love to see them introducing a control group for their "toxicity" model by including subs from their other identified clusters. How can you know what it means for tankies to be millions of billions toxic if you don't have baselines? I do like how they agree with r/liberal and r/conservative being in the same cluster though. On the domain analysis I'd require them to also include the total number of articles and not just the percentages, which I'd bet would give a fun graph.

Overall, I've read less funny and more informative parody papers. For the AI nerds, this one might be fun.

🤣🤣🤣 I'm in tears. Actual tears.

I’d love to see them introducing a control group for their “toxicity” model by including subs from their other identified clusters. How can you know what it means for tankies to be millions of billions toxic if you don’t have baselines?

Ironically(?) the funding is to develop a machine learning algorithm not to spot and moderate racism but to spot and moderate the least racist of any two examples. Which means, the project is to develop a comparative model but they haven't thought about using comparison within the research itself. Meanwhile, real scholars get fired from all over the place for being in unions and demanding a living wage.
It sure is lovely that the “AI” “Revolution” has given hacks a bunch of hard to audit but scientific-sounding metrics for them to apply however they want.

I'm slogging through it right now and coming to similar assessments. "With enough Machine Learning shenanigans, I can arrive at whatever conclusion I want!"
- They're tired of gaslighting people into becoming liberals, now they're doing it with machines. Whoever thought of letting misinformation giants like Google "teach" "AI" should be fired at.

Can't post the image because of the maintenance but basically we are the biggest Marxist forum, since the other web sites are stuff that's mostly not even Leninist, stuff like marxist.org, archive.vn, and news sites.

Marxists.org being tankie is the hot take I didn't really need. First they came for Stalin, then Lenin, then Marx. Eventually even Trotsky Encyclopaedia and raddle will join their ranks in the tanks.
- Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, Engels, Luxemburg - all tankies. Leo Iljitsch Stalinzedong and Karl Engels von Liebknecht killed 30 Billions people.
  
  No joke, I remember writing absolute bullshit on facebook years ago to troll liberals. I said things like that Lenin kept slaves and bribed the workes with beer, to gain support. Guess what, their only problem were, that I said, that communism killed 5 billion people. This number was "a little bit to high" lol

I did an in-depth 'debunk' of this study.

I want to highlight the most egregious part of it, to me at least. Here's an excerpt from my article:

As we find later in Section 5.4, tankies have the most proportion of posts with high identity attack against Jews in the far-left community.

??? Let’s pull up that section quickly:

The Perspective API [92] is a widely used [9, 12, 26] tool for measuring toxicity. Although it has limitations, e.g., there are issues of bias and questions of performance when encountering conversation patterns that it was not trained on, at scale it provides a decent measure for comparison between online communities.

They used an API tool to analyze comments on the tankie subreddits. They specifically mention that it has limitations if it wasn’t trained on certain conversation patterns. The Perspective website doesn’t mention it being trained on Reddit comments or comments in leftist communities. This is junk science, of course.

Finally, we observe that tankies frequently target Muslims and Jews in their posts.

I’m not about to dig too deep into the way this API determines what constitutes an Identity Attack, since this study doesn’t even attempt to elaborate on it, but I’m going to assume that if it detects ‘hateful words’ in the same comment as a ‘named entity’ like Jew or Muslim, it just assumes the comment is attacking that entity.

Here’s the problem. A comment like this:

“Zionists are pieces of shit for assuming all Jews support Israel”

or this:

“Implying that the US gives a fuck about Muslims when they criticize China is delusional”

would likely be considered by this bot to be an attack against Jews or Muslims. Curiously, this report doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence of these attacks on Jews or Muslims. But, in the ‘C.1 Qualitative Validation’ section, they do give some examples of the toxic comments that this bot identified. Not a single one is specifically about Jews or Muslims.

Here’s two examples:

To me, boarding schools serve as schools for potential terrorists, and China’s approach seems more humane than the US’s

and

Zionism equates to Fascism.

Neither comment is an Identity Attack against Muslims or Jews. The first is talking specifically about the small portion of Uyghurs that China has identified as being radicalized, not all Muslims. The second is about Zionism, which as this study pointed out, does not mean all Jews. Neither one contains the word ‘Jew’, or ‘Muslim’, anyway.

Hmm, I wonder why they omitted that. Because the truth doesn’t fit the ‘tankie bad’ narrative they are pushing? This is research misconduct, pure and simple, and this singular example of evidentiary omission should cause any non-tankies reading this study to dismiss it in its entirety. But of course, it won’t.