nothing that Ethan has said recently has convinced me that he isn’t a zionist. Read my other comment
Hila compared this to the holocaust. Do you agree with that assessment? She said it feels like the holocaust again.
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.
It happened after I posted that, I need to write a new article with all of the new nonsense they’ve said. I wrote it before the Leftovers episode, which is where Hila said it.
https://youtu.be/JFznOHunD_c?t=2604
“a reminder the Holocaust wasn’t that long ago and every every year on Holocaust day the thing they tell you is never forget you always have to tell the stories to everybody about what happened at the Holocaust and I it’s always like something taken for granted for me you just grow up and you’re like yeah Holocaust day you know it happened we all get it but what happened this time is really scary and it it really does bring up this topic”
https://youtu.be/JFznOHunD_c?t=2701
“it’s important to empathize with how a Jewish person or specifically an Israeli might feel hearing these phone calls there are kids that survived because they were laying under their dead parents bodies and they laid there for hours the whole day and that’s how they survived and the last time we heard stories like that was at the Holocaust”