Authors:
(1) UTKUCAN BALCI, Binghamton University, United States;
(2) MICHAEL SIRIVIANOS, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus;
(3) JEREMY BLACKBURN, Binghamton University, United States.
Table of Links
Abstract and 1 Introduction
2 Background & Related Work
3 Data
3.1 Identifying Tankie Subreddits
3.2 Identifying Ideology Subreddits and 3.3 Post Collection
4 User-Base Analysis and 4.1 Graph Construction & Community Detection
4.2 Community Growth
4.3 User Migrations Over Time
5 Content Analysis and 5.1 What do tankies talk about?
5.2 Who are tankies talking about?
5.3 Misalignment Analysis
5.4 Toxicity Analysis
5.5 Domain Analysis
5.6 Lemmygrad Analysis
6 Discussion & Conclusion and 6.1 Limitations
6.2 Implications & future work, and References
A DATA
B NAMED ENTITIES
C MISALIGNMENT ANALYSIS
D DOMAIN ANALYSIS
5.5 Domain Analysis
In Section 5.3, we find that tankies tend to use Chinese and Russian news outlets in a similar way to how r/DemocraticSocialism uses US news outlets. Based on this discovery, we compare the sharing of news outlets by far-left communities according to “state types” (a more detailed analysis can
be found in Appendix D). We use a set of selected outlets to represent three geopolitical groups identified by Xu et al.[130]:
(1) Revisionist World Powers: 17 different state-sponsored or state-controlled news outlets from China and Russia.
(2) Regional Challengers: 6 different news outlets from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey.
(3) Liberal Democracies: 9 different news outlets from Korea, UK, USA, Germany, EU, France, Israel, and Japan.
Figure 6 shows the distribution of the three geopolitical groups among tankie subreddits and other far-left communities. On average, tankies share outlets from “Revisionist World Powers” 60% of the time, while r/communism shares them 51.3% of the time. Other far-left communities, in order of decreasing sharing frequency, are r/socialism (29.7%), r/Marxism (18.1%), r/alltheleft (17.8%), r/DemocraticSocialism (6.3%), and r/Anarchism (3.7%), with r/IWW not sharing any. While tankies are the top far-left community in terms of sharing outlets from “Revisionist World Powers,” they rank last in terms of sharing outlets from “Regional Challengers” and “Liberal Democracies,” with averages of 10% and 30%, respectively.
Takeaways. We examine the domains that reflect the characteristics of tankies and compared their sharing of news outlets with other far-left subreddits. We find that tankies have a higher proportion of shared news outlets from “Revisionist World Powers,” which comprise state-sponsored or statecontrolled outlets from China and Russia, compared to their similar ideological counterparts. In contrast, they have the lowest proportion of shared news from “Regional Challengers” and “Liberal Democracies.” Given the history of misinformation and disinformation from news outlets in Russia and China [13], these findings may suggest that tankies prefer sources of misleading information compared to other far-left communities.
5.6 Lemmygrad Analysis
Lemmygrad.ml is a Marxist/Leninist platform that resembles Reddit and is made up of various leftist communities. Our domain analysis, detailed in Appendix B, identified lemmygrad.ml as a prevalent domain among tankies. This leads us to examine the platform as a potential Reddit alternative of this community, particularly in light of recent bans on other platforms. Utilizing a custom crawler specifically designed for this platform, we collect a corpus of 242,370 posts from 1,744 communities spanning the period of April 20, 2019 to April 31, 2022.
Our findings (Figure 7), demonstrate the Lemmygrad.ml’s popularity among tankie communities. The most popular community, genzhouarchive (48,231 posts), being an archive of a tankie subreddit in our dataset, r/GenZhou. Additionally, the second most popular community on the platform, GenZedong, further solidifies the platform’s utility as a Reddit alternative for tankies.
Monthly Posting Activity. To investigate the impact of quarantines on the popularity of r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou on lemmygrad.ml, we analyze the monthly number of posts for the communities genzhouarchive, genzedong, and the entire lemmygrad.ml. Figure 8 shows that the quarantine of r/GenZedong in February 2022 led to a drastic increase in monthly posts, reaching a peak of
4,890 in March 2022. Conversely, as it is an archive community, the ban of r/GenZhou in April 2022 resulted in a significant decline in activity, with the total number of posts dropping from 7,862 to 41 in the subsequent month. Additionally, we observe a general increase in monthly posts on lemmygrad.ml, particularly in the months following the bans/quarantines. Our findings suggest that quarantines and bans have an impact on the popularity of communities on lemmygrad.ml.
Monthly Perspective Analysis. Ribeiro et al.[56] found an increase in toxicity after r/The_Donald users migrated to the thedonald.win, as measured by Perspective API scores. Building on this, we perform a monthly analysis of high Perspective API scores on lemmygrad.ml.
As illustrated in Figure 9, we observe that the proportion of high scores for the TOXICITY, SEVERE_TOXICITY, INSULT, IDENTITY_ATTACK, THREAT, and PROFANITY models reaches its peak on lemmygrad.ml during the year of its founding, 2019. Notably, during 2019, when the platform had low monthly activity (a mean of 988 posts), we see more high Perspective API scores overall. However, in 2020 and 2021, we see the mean high scores for all perspective models more than halved. This could potentially be attributed to the presence of a more radicalized core group of users on the platform in its early months.
Interestingly, we find that in March and April 2022, despite having the highest number of monthly posts, the mean high scores for all perspective models reached their peak since 2020. This increase suggests that the platform migration of tankies led to an increase in toxicity among the tankie community on lemmygrad.ml.
Takeaways. We find that the user base of lemmygrad.ml consists largely of tankies. Our analysis shows that the top two communities on this platform are associated with tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou. Furthermore, our findings suggest that platform migration lead to an increase in toxicity of tankies, highlighting the importance of considering the potential impact of platform migration on online communities.
