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"Research" by US university says lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website (twitter.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by cucumovirus@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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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.

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[–] aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ComradePupIvy@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 1 year ago

But they used AI, and the Free one used Human Power

[–] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 1 year ago

And they say commies are the lazy ones! This is great!

[–] aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

[–] aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 1 year ago

Studies on Extremist Online Communities

Online communities have led to an increased ability for individuals to express their views and connect with others who share similar ideologies. Although the vast majority of these communities are benign, a small subset of them are extremist in nature, espousing views that are well outside the mainstream and often promoting violence [41, 110 , 111 ].

Sources in question...

  • 41 is (libgen link): "Tiana Gaudette, Ryan Scrivens, and Vivek Venkatesh. 2020. The role of the internet in facilitating violent extremism: Insights from former right-wing extremists. Terrorism and Political Violence (2020), 1–18."
  • 110 is (libgen does not have latest volumes of journal): "Ryan Scrivens, Amanda Isabel Osuna, Steven M Chermak, Michael A Whitney, and Richard Frank. 2021. Examining Online Indicators of Extremism in Violent Right-Wing Extremist Forums. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2021), 1–25."
  • 111 is (libgen journal missing volumes): "Ryan Scrivens, Thomas W Wojciechowski, and Richard Frank. 2020. Examining the developmental pathways of online posting behavior in violent right-wing extremist forums. Terrorism and Political Violence (2020), 1–18."

All three share a common author, Ryan Scrivens. If I were concerned with an unfair bias against right-wing extremism, I might dig into the networks of authors involved to root out that bias. And yet that doesn't occur here. More to the point though, all three of these sources are focused on right-wing extremism. This undercuts their assertion in the next sentences:

These extremist online communities can exist across the political spectrum, including right-wing and left-wing, as well as religious and other forms of ideologies. Furthermore, it has been observed that there can be similarities and overlap in the user bases of these communities.

Apart from being unsupported by the sources cited in the prior sentence, the sentences themselves are uncited. The citation given next:

For example, research by Mame et al. has shown that anti-feminist communities can serve as gateways to the far-right, with significant overlap between the Manosphere and the alt-right observed in their studies on Reddit and Youtube [75].

  • 75 is (arxiv link): "Robin Mamié, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, and Robert West. 2021. Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube. In WebSci. 139–147."

also does not support a "both-sides" reading of left-wing and right-wing extremism, as the "overlap" in question is between stages of a pipeline within an ideological gradient, not between thoroughly contradictory ideological gradients.

Moreover, while the psycho-political profiles of left and right-wing extremists display considerable diversity [ 125 ], these extremist communities may exhibit similarities in their responses to specific events, e.g., left-wing and right-wing extremists fighting against ISIS in Syria [70].

  • 125 is (libgen link): "Alain Van Hiel. 2012. A psycho-political profile of party activists and left-wing and right-wing extremists. EJPR 51, 2 (2012), 166–203."
  • 70 is (libgen link): "Ariel Koch. 2021. The non-jihadi foreign fighters: Western right-wing and left-wing extremists in Syria. Terrorism and Political Violence 33, 4 (2021), 669–696."

If we have evidence of broad diversity across these two wings, and the strongest examples we have of left-wing and right-wing extremism being similar to each other is both sides saying "ISIS bad" and fighting against them, then perhaps that lends credence to the alternative answer: that the similarities either are not strong, or do not even exist.

Studies on Islamist extremism investigated the role of social media in the spread of extremist ideologies. Research has shown that these extremists use social media platforms to disseminate propaganda, recruit new members, coordinate attacks, amplify the voices of extremist leaders, and create a sense of community among like-minded individuals [ 16 , 18, 95].

  • 16 is (libgen link): "Matthew C Benigni, Kenneth Joseph, and Kathleen M Carley. 2017. Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter. PloS one 12, 12 (2017), e0181405."
  • 18 is (online link): "Jonathon M Berger and Jonathon Morgan. 2015. The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter. Brookings Institution."
  • 95 is (libgen link): "James A Piazza and Ahmet Guler. 2021. The online caliphate: Internet usage and ISIS support in the Arab world. Terrorism and political violence 33, 6 (2021), 1256–1275."

Nothing particularly objectionable here. Social media is important for all political leanings, left and right, extreme and moderate.

A comparative study [64] of the use of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists found that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are likely to be less violent.

  • 64 is (online link): "Katarzyna Jasko, Gary LaFree, James Piazza, and Michael H Becker. 2022. A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world. PNAS 119, 30 (2022), e2122593119."

So... the only study that could be found works against the notion that the right-wing and left-wing extremists are comparable.

This entire segment is, in itself, adequate explanation for the complaints of the next section: that there is "imbalance in research on online extremism." There is imbalance because left-wing and right-wing extremists are not, in fact, isomorphic. There are differences that matter, and those differences inform where researchers spend their limited time, budget, and energy.