this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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This study investigates the presence of left-wing extremism on the Lemmygrad.ml instance of the decentralized social media platform Lemmy, from its launch in 2019 up to a month after the bans of the subreddits r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou.

We conduct a temporal analysis on Lemmygrad.ml’s user activity, with also measuring the degree of highly abusive or hateful content. Furthermore, we explore the content of their posts using a transformer-based topic modeling approach.

Our findings reveal a substantial increase in user activity and toxicity levels following the migration of these subreddits to Lemmygrad.ml.

We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content.

Overall, our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of political extremism within decentralized social networks and emphasize the necessity of analyzing both ends of the political spectrum in research.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40188039

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[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 43 points 3 days ago (3 children)

As far as I can tell, this isn't even peer reviewed.

[–] CriticalResist8@hexbear.net 22 points 3 days ago (1 children)

it's not, it's on arxiv because they will publish anything. It has upsides and downsides. They only seem to publish on arxiv, I wonder why these papers don't show up anywhere else lol. Also one of them got a 10,000$ (or 40,000, idr) grant from their universities some time back to do this kind of "research"

[–] VILenin@hexbear.net 10 points 2 days ago

Western prestige universities are neoliberal ideology factories pumping out dipshits like these and death machine engineers. Their ghoul donors pay billions for them to churn out shit like this

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 18 points 3 days ago

Only because the authors are peerless.

[–] Chana@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It was presented at a conference in Copenhagen and so was surely peer reviewed.

Peer review is garbage.

[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sorry to be pedantic. I don't believe that all conferences are peer reviewed. Gosh, maybe many or most are? Also I thought the peer review for a conference was much more lax. Maybe you know something I don't know?

You're right that peer review is problematic AF. I just find with science articles, it's a good quick rule of thumb is decision on whether something is worth considering deeply.

Sorry that reply was much longer than I expected.

[–] Chana@hexbear.net 11 points 2 days ago

The laxity of peer review depends on the field and which set of nerds the paper or conference organizers could cobble together. In many fields, particularly those heavy on math, conferences are more prestigious than journals most of the time. They all meet up a few times per year to compare notes, basically.

This was presented at a peer reviewed conference. Who knows how careful they were, but the entire subfield of social media analysis is a joke so it doesn't get much better than this. Just more obfuscatory.

PS in science it's also still garbage. So many reviewers put no effort in, have pettu grievances, are jealous of the work and hypercriticize it, or, most commomly, suggest you cite their own papers lest you be "unaware of seminal research on this topic". Passing peer review is not much of a filter, either. P-hacked garbage is rampant.

The real review of peers is when others try to build practically on published work. If it is truly wrong, they will fail and the field will eventually realize this. Most publications are ignored or not used meaningfully by others. They just pad resumes and end up on grant applications.