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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Essentially that there a bunch of far-left users (in reddit in this case but in other places too) colloquially refered to as “tankies”. They are noticably different from other groups and the centre- and far-left in what they talk about, who they associate with, and the agressiveness of their discussions.

    They are far more focused on parroting the offical state position of the CCP, DPRK and Russia, far less interested in social issues and more interested in geo-politics, and far more likely to use violent language “kill the libs” etc.

    The authors show this by looking at a huge chunk of reddit posts seeing who posts what, where and how communities link to each other.

    This figure

    is hard to understand at first but instructive once you do. For each of the word pairing the word on the left is what the tankie subreddits use and the one on the right is what the non tankie far-left subreddit in that column uses, the number is how strong this difference is. For example the blue one in the third column (Zelensky - Trump) means that the tankies use “Zelensky” in the same way the r/DemocraticSocialism uses “Trump”, presumably talking shit about them. It gives a sense of just how different the discourse is between them and even the groups who you would expect to be ideologically most similar to them, and how they hugely prefer to use terms and framing that the Russian and Chinese government do.


  • I saw some research about this recently let me see if I can find it, it was based on reddit communities but I think it applies to lemmy as much if not more.

    ah here it is

    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- and disinformation, and real-world violence. However, most existing work has focuses on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale measurement study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “Actually Existing Socialist” countries, e.g., CCP-run China, the USSR, and North Korea. We collect and analyze 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankie subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the distinct positioning and discourse of left-wing extremist groups on social media.