The Rise of Tankies: A Data-Driven Look at Far-Left Extremism

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

6 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented a data-driven analysis of the left-wing extremist community known as “tankies.” Although they have existed since the 1950s, when they supported hardline Soviet actions, more recently, tankies’ ideology has shifted to support so called “actually existing socialist countries,” including China, Russia, and North Korea. To better understand tankies, we collected over 1.3M posts from 53K authors across six subreddits. Among other things, we find that tankies are a clearly defined community positioned at the periphery of the larger far-left on Reddit. We also find that tankies show significant differences with respect to what and who they talk about. For example, tankies have consistent vocabulary misalignments and are more toxic than other far-left groups. Unlike other left-wing communities, tankies also talk much more about state-level political events as opposed to social issues. We further find that tankies responded to a deplatforming event by migrating a decentralized platform, resulting in a net increase in toxicity within the community.

6.1 Limitations

Tankies are almost completely unexplored in social media related work, and relatively unexplored in the broader literature when compared to more “mainstream” far-left ideologies like communism. This raises some concerns with respect to our interpretations and our dataset itself. While our results are definitely in-line with what little literature exists on the topic, the name “tankies” has absolutely drifted from its original meaning. We rely in large part on the tankie community on Reddit’s self description of “tankie,” and although it aligns with recent use in the literature [94], it is worth recognizing that there is not a rich body of theoretical work for us to draw from when interpreting results.

Despite the robustness of our methodology, it is important to acknowledge that our analysis is dependent on the accuracy of third-party tools and resources utilized. As such, potential limitations and sources of error should be considered, particularly in light of the findings of Hoffman et al.’s evaluation of such tools [54]. Our results are ultimately bounded by limitations of the tools we employed, e.g., the Perspective API’s potential inaccuracies and biases in toxicity detection [58], Word2Vec’s lack of semantic understanding and limitations in capturing syntactic relationships [33], and BERTopic potentially generating more outliers than expected [36]. That said, considering that our analysis are inline with the theoretical literature as well as empirical results from other online extremists, we have high confidence that our main findings hold.

Our dataset also has a notable lack of far-right communities. For example, there is no representation of fascism or alt-right communities. While the major explanation for this is relatively simple (Reddit has aggressively removed far-right extremists and some right-wing oriented subreddits like r/fascism are private), it is definitely a caveat when we compare tankies to right-wing extremism in general.

6.2 Implications & future work

The major implication of our work is that the research community should (and must) broaden its focus when it comes to online extremism. While claims from the far-right (and more increasingly mainstream conservatives) characterizing leftist political movements like Antifa and Black Lives Matter as being dangerous extremists have mostly been unfounded, our results show that there is a growing movement of far-left extremists operating online. And although the overwhelming majority of extremist actors online have been right-wing, the literature is quite clear on how state-sponsored actors have played both-sides of the game, posing as leftists to foment dissent and polarization [21].

Many of our results indicate that left-wing extremists exhibit some of the same behaviors that make right-wing extremists such a danger to society. For example, the unwavering support for authoritative governments (Russia in particular), coupled with our results that show how quickly the tankies community grew by siphoning off users from other far-left communities, shapes a situation that looks a lot like the early days of the modern breed of far-right online extremists the research community has focused on so intently. With this in mind, we highly encourage future work to further explore this relationship. For example, instead of comparing tankies to other far-left communities, a fruitful path might be to directly compare tankies to right-wing extremists. In particular, understanding not just the similarities, but the differences between left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists can help us design better moderation systems and improve the overall governance of social media platforms.

Finally, from a more introspective point of view, our study exposes the need for some so called “intellectual diversity” in future research within this general problem domain. While the explosion in online extremism has mostly been on the right side of the political spectrum, the overall political leaning of researchers is on the left side of things [87]. It is unlikely that any conscious bias has led to the dearth in literature on left-wing extremism; that is almost certainly attributable to current world events. But, the rapid growth of the tankies community, the patterns of behavior that are similar to other extremist groups that have been involved in real-world violence, the effective use of technology to evade moderation efforts, etc., are clear signals that researchers must pay attention to a radicalization pathway that likely includes some of our own ideological perspectives.

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