The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
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.
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.
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/
they don’t know us very well if they think a disrespectful comment is going to make us leave a conversation
Do they not realise that this is exactly what we face in every other online space for have the tenacity to insist that publicly recorded and strongly evidenced events did happen?
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.
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?
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.
Well, yes. But also, as long as most comments has “the” at least once, “the” will be listed.
Orange gallbladder golfcart
We say thank you quite a lot though it seems
comrade, thanks. You comrade, thank.
I didn’t actually notice that! I got as as the word “the”, and tuned out. It’s hilarious that words like “thanks” and “sorry” rate so highly on this very toxic extremist community.
“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.
LESGOOOO #LEMMYGRADSWEEP ✊✊✊🫡🫡🫡
also: genocide, xinjiang, camps, communism, no, inshallah, socialism, socialist, is, the, of, korea, north, kim, dprk, korean, media, chen, falun, gong, news, comrade, thanks, you, comrades, thank, thank, thanks, you, nice, good, fascism, fascist, fascists, the, is, ussr, soviet, the, art, of, lol, wtf, real, holy, wait, ok, hope, wish, you, sorry, fucking, bot, fuck, sometimes, beep, china, nukes, us, war, the, joke, submission, guideline, r/socialism, this, cuba, cuban, castro, the, fidel, lgbt, trans, gay, the, and, vote, voting, caucus, party, green, source, u/vredditdownloader, context, picture, where
i am now a master tankie 🫡🫡🫡
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!
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.
(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)
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.
We gotta get prolewiki on there next.
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.
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.
I will be honest, the work done here, in this thread is more than they did in the entire paper. and of higher quality, in my humble opinion.
Which is why we’re worth every Xi buck.
Shh! If they find out we’re funded by China they might use their powerful, scary AI word-cloud analysis on us and cause trouble (somehow).
Also Xi says to please increase the frequency of the usage of the phrase SWCC. He says if we are going to be funded we need to better extol its virtues and that means by the next paper like this it better be there near the very top or cuts are coming to our funding.
The comment length limit is 5,000 characters so you could make a comment consisting of SWCC 1,000 times
SWCC
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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
You fool, you weren’t supposed to count the 1,000,000,000 Ukrainians that Stalin’s spoon killed as people /s
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.
Informed by the scant literature that exists on tankies, we first construct a set of tankie subreddits. We then measure the over 1M posts from 50K authors in our dataset across a variety of axes, giving us a unique view of how tankies are positioned within the larger left-wing community."
Not sure what they mean by “scant literature that exists on tankies” when they just cited seven sources concerning the term’s etymology and history. Perhaps they mean scant literature on the evolved definition which they get into in section two (Background and Related Work). But regardless, this does sound like an interesting way to approach analyzing political communities within Reddit.
"We perform a set of quantitative analyses that reveal the relationship between tankies, other far-left communities, leftists, feminists, and capitalists. By constructing a graph where nodes are subreddits and an edge exists from one subreddit to another if the first subreddit links to the second in its sidebar, we identify 6 tankie subreddits and examined their prominence and connectivity within a reference network of over 21 K subreddits.
(emphasis added)
Hoo boy that’s not a good methodology. You’ll want to examine links made by users within one subreddit to another subreddit and weigh the edges accordingly. Otherwise, the only sampling you’re getting is from moderators and admins of the subreddits – seeing as they are the only ones with the ability to update the sidebar – and the only weight you’re getting is binary yes/no on links existing. That’s a start, I suppose, but you’re gonna have some heavy bias and skew in there.
We then compare the user overlap between our identified set of ideological subreddits.
This might be interesting, depending on how they measure engagement within individual subreddits to ascertain overlap.
We also look at how tankies compare to the rest of the far-left with respect to their vocabulary, the topics they discuss, who they discuss, and the toxicity of their discussions.
And this is where the sentiment analysis will come in. These tools are notoriously flakey, but we’ll take a look at how they’ve been deployed, and how their limitations have been accounted for.
Finally, we measure user migrations between left-wing communities
This could actually be interesting! Do specific users migrate over time in identifiable paths? E.g., “I was a liberal, then a Bernie supporter, then a Democratic Socialist, then a Marxist-Leninist.”
as well as tankies’ response to a deplatforming event.
I’m guessing this is where Lemmy.ml and LemmyGrad.ml come in.
Background and Related Work
TODO
For $500k USD, you can get the low quality ArXiv article; for free, you can have this high quality teardown of said article.
Thank you for the amount of effort this took to put together. I’ve done only a quick skim but I’m going to give it a full read. Some stuff that definitely stood out to me is: the horseshoe theory nonsense; and the “rude words mean evil person” nonsense. Use of charged words or negative sentiment don’t make you bad or wrong; arguably, negative sentiment is the only rational response to a lot of the topics at hand.
But they used AI, and the Free one used Human Power
Background and Related Work
What is a “tankie?”
Tankie was originally a pejorative term referring to communists who supported the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 [34, 50, 94, 100, 105 , 107 ]. Over the years, the context of the usage of tankie evolved. For example, it has been used to show derision towards pro-Soviet hardliners [ 43], to describe communists who support China’s policies [72] (e.g., supporters of China’s actions on Uyghurs [104 ] and the Hong Kong protests [10]), as well as young, online Stalinists in general [44].
The first cluster of sources (along with source 43) is the same as earlier in Section 1 (I have yet to interrogate all of them; TODO, though I suspect the overall thrust of the sources will accurately characterize the history and etymology of the term “tankie”). Source 104 has also already been briefly examined and leans heavily on Zenz, Radio Free Asia, and South China Morning Post in the sources that were examined from it. The remaining sources (72, 10, and 44) are:
- 72 is (online link): “Fabio Lanza. 2021. Of Rose-coloured glasses, old and new. Made in China Journal 6, 2 (2021), 22–27”
- 10 is: “Sebastian Skov Andersen and Thomas Chan. 2021. Tankie man: The pro-democracy Hong Kongers standing up to Western Communists. https://thediplomat.com/2021/03/tankie-man-the-pro-democracy-hong-kongers-standing-up-to-western-communists/”
- 44 is (This article is new enough that libgen doesn’t have the recent volumes from the journal; any active students in the audience, feel free to drop a PDF): “Dustin A Greenwalt and James Alexander McVey. 2022. Get Gritty with it: memetic icons and the visual ethos of antifascism. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2022), 1–22.”
The article from Made In China Journal is from someone who appears to be a Maoist.
On 18 September 2021, the Qiao Collective co-organised an all-day conference on the topic of ‘China and the Left: A Socialist Forum’ (The People’s Forum 2021). The speakers, who participated either in person or via Zoom, included scholars of China but also noted ‘leftist’ intellectuals, from Vijay Prashad to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Radhika Desai. The forum was co-sponsored by the Monthly Review, the People’s Forum, and Codepink. The Qiao Collective (2021)—a ‘volunteer-run group of diaspora Chinese writers, artists, and researchers working to challenge escalating Western imperialism on China’—has in the past two years evolved from a Twitter account to a full-blown online publication and has become a loud pro-China voice in the United States and in global political discourse. While the various presenters at the forum took different approaches, and some arguments were more nuanced than others, the overall tone was very supportive of the current regime in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and extremely critical of US policies in Asia as well as of Western media coverage of China. Events like this exemplify what seems to be an increasingly visible and vocal presence of pro-PRC positions within the so-called left, in the United States but also worldwide.
These positions, often subsumed under the disparaging moniker ‘tankie’—a term that was originally used to describe leftists who supported the line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, with specific reference to those who supported the deployment of Soviet tanks to suppress the Hungarian revolution of 1956—present historians with the second instance in which ‘China’ has featured as a politically significant conceptual category for activists around the world.
Consulting an author with opposing ideology (Maoism) to the ideology in question (“tankie”; more specifically here though, perhaps “Dengist”/“supporter of Reform and Opening Up”) is, charitably, an exercise in dialectical materialism of a sort, I suppose. Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninists do broadly support China’s policies, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or restraint, and Maoists broadly don’t. So that does at least offer some categorical boundaries for the authors to work with in forming cohorts around different far-left ideologies.
The article from The Diplomat, however, is a far less nuanced take:
When a still unidentified man stepped in front of a line of tanks that were leaving Tiananmen Square the day after the massacre that killed around 1,000 student protesters, it was at the risk of his life. The same cannot be said for modern day pro-democracy activists, who are standing up to modern day tankies — that’s Western, often young, supporters of communist, authoritarian regimes — considering most of the battling is taking place online.
There was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square. There was certainly fighting in the streets --away from where the students in the square were-- and the CPC itself even lists the dead from this fighting at 241, a far cry from the “around 1,000 student protesters” given, both in terms of the number and in terms of who died.
Regardless, here, tankie is “young western supporters of communist authoritarian regimes.” This definition is, at best, orthogonal to the previous ones proffered. The article has some other choice bits:
Sophie Mak, a pro-democracy activist and student who does work digitally monitoring human rights at the Human Rights Hub at University of Hong Kong, has, many times over, gotten caught in fights with tankies online who criticize her work as a smear campaign against China. She told The Diplomat that tankies often pose an obstacle when promoting human rights. They attack and refute even the most well-sourced claims of China’s human rights abuses — something she has had to deal with in her own work.
The sources and claims either stand up to scrutiny or they don’t. That holds for all inquiry.
“And, of course, that worldview is fundamentally flawed. Because, as I always say, China does not present an alternative to whatever order that these people are upset with,” said Ngo. “China is an integral part of it.”
Again with citing those with opposing ideologies from the ideology in question. Though I suppose this does dovetail nicely with citing a Maoist.
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 succinct description of tankies:
“Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.”
Not a particularly objectionable definition to me, though also incredibly broad. From the introduction up until now, the paper has struggled to pin down what, precisely, constitutes a “tankie.” I’ll give the authors some slack, in that ideologies are fluid and dynamic things that, to some extent, certainly seem to intentionally defy neat categorization. And we can of course also recognize the nature of Contradiction more broadly and take a charitable overview of the authors’ frequent citation of an ideology’s opponents in coming to define it. No ideological framework can be entirely free of contradiction, after all. But that slack can also be used to hang oneself in later analysis. Specifically, I can think of two scenarios where that might happen:
- One cherry-picks different facets of one’s collective definition at different times to paint a narrative that is self-coherent but at odds with the totality of the facts.
- One doesn’t actually have a sound understanding of the ideology at play, and thus mis-identifies or mis-labels crucial early-stage data in the analysis pipeline that taints the resulting conclusions.
At this point, I’m strongly suspicious of the second option having occurred at least, especially given the quality and ideological leanings of the sources cited so far.
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”.
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.