"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?

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

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??

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

TO THE MOON

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.

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

"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.

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.

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!

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.

lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website

based

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 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.

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.

Hell yeah good job everybody

Why do they think we think all Jews are Zionists?

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 🫡🫡🫡

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.

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.

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.

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

We gotta get prolewiki on there next.

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."

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.

Soon we will be more tankie than Marxists.org.

(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)

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.

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".