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  • 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.

    • 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?

  • 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??

  • 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:

      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:

      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:

        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.

    • 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).

        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.

  • 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/

    • next publication: "computation and assessing of the "meany badie nasty bad literaly made me cry" index of the lemmygrad comunity"

  • 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.

    • 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?

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • Also, hi, everyone, I'm back, and wow, we became famous all the sudden.

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