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
5.2 Who are tankies talking about?
Although topic analysis provides us meaningful insights about the differences in the focus of discussion between tankies and other far-left communities, we are limited to the information we can collect from the words in the topic, and some topics contain multiple, opposing actors; e.g., we can not understand if tankies talk more about Russia or Ukraine in the related topic. Therefore, we next examine named entities used by far-left communities to gain a deeper understanding of the differences in their focus.
We extract named entities using the en_core_web_lg model of the SpaCy library [5], which is trained on OntoNotes [59], clearNLP [1], WordNet [83], and Common Crawl [2] datasets. It has previously been used in studies on social media platforms and news articles [9, 88, 127].
Results. In Table 3, we present the top 20 named entities, their frequency, and the percent of posts they appear in for tankies. In the appendix, Table 9 shows the same information for other far-left subreddits. The most popular named entities tankies mention are related to China (China, Chinese, Mao), the United States (US, American, America, Americans, CIA, USA), the USSR (Stalin, USSR, Lenin), Russia, Ukraine, Nazis, and some numeric and date related named entities. We also observe similar entities being discussed on r/communism, r/socialism, r/Marxism, and r/Anarchism, with only small differences. Notably, Ukraine is only present in the most popular named entities of tankies. Consistent with our findings in Section 5.1, this likely indicates a focus on Russia-Ukraine relations and specifically the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
When looking at the specific named entities, we see that tankies mention China at a higher rate than other far-left subreddits. Additionally, tankies mention Stalin nearly twice as often as Lenin. This is interesting because we find other far-left communities mention Lenin in similar or higher proportions compared to Stalin. As outlined in Section 5.1, tankies tend to focus more on topics related to China and Stalin compared to other far-left communities. These disparities show that the inclination of tankies towards China and Stalinism is a defining characteristic, which aligns well with Petterson’s description.
Finally, we compare the similarity of the most popular named entities of tankies and other far-left communities by using Rank Biased Overlap [128], which measures the similarity of two indefinite ranked lists by giving weight to top N ranks, where the ranked lists do not need to be conjoint. The results indicate that r/communism is the most similar to tankies in terms of named entity rankings, with a score of 0.74, followed by r/socialism (0.70), r/Anarchism (0.62), r/alltheleft (0.55), r/Marxism (0.53), r/DemocraticSocialism (0.39), and r/IWW (0.38), respectively.
Takeaways. The results of our analysis reveal that the most popular named entities mentioned by tankies are related to China, the United States, the USSR, Russia, Ukraine, and Nazis. Additionally, we find that tankies mention China at a higher rate and Stalin nearly twice as often as Lenin, compared to other far-left communities. Our findings demonstrate that the preference for China and Stalinism is a defining characteristic of tankies. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that Ukraine is among the most popular named entities of the tankies community, and not among the most popular of the other communities. This suggests that the topic of Russia-Ukraine relations is more relevant or important to tankies, or that this community’s members engage in more discussion on this topic than those of other far-left communities.
