Slop.

They love to say this, then they try it and get completely called out and banned within 30 minutes

Behold: the stunning incompetencd rife in academia. One does not need to understand a subject matter or produce an interesting and well-executed result, they must only please their funders and publish. There are errors all over the place, beginning with the basic premise of not critically examining their loaded term, "extremism", but I'll point out things I found funny.

The two most popular communities, c/genzhouarchive and c/genzedong, are related to left-wing extremist subreddits that have faced restrictions from Reddit

c/genzhouarchive, as you might guess from the name, is an archive basically bereft of user interaction. It just reproduces the posts from the subreddit and naturally hasn't had new posts in two years. They call this the "most popular" presumably because it has the most posts but refused to rub their big braincells together long enough to understand its content... again, obvious from even just the name.

where r/GenZedong was quarantined for spreading misinformation (Chow 2022)

Again a loaded term that goes uncritically examined. The factual accuracy of what is said is never contended with in this article nor the citation. Per the citation it is misinformation because Reddit the company said it and some Reddit users made allegations.

This is also a subgenre of academic grifting and it goes hand in hand with these "topix modeling" papers that look at Reddit, Twitter, etc. It is primarily a way to receive funding from liberal institutions to "understand misinformation" etc on social media and they all use the same vacuous terminology and methods of investigation, generally without critical investigation of the meaning of their own work. Meaning it simply asserted, simplistically.

Our manual inspection on the banners of these subreddits finds that they fit Petterson’s description of contemporary tankies (Petterson 2020)

lmao they put quotes around so many terms but not tankies. The axe-grinding political incompetents can't hide their angle despite the pretenses.

Also their citation is to a "biblical studies" journal and article by a big Foucault fan. The authors presumably have no idea who Foucault is and cited this just to have a citation for the word tankie, something I find amusing.

Temporal Analysis

They created an entire plot and wrote sentences about how the genzhou archive stopped having posts because it is an archive and got banned from Reddit. So they did understand it as an archive but still say "most popular" out of incredible intellectual laziness. And then waste time saying anything more about it, including posts going down when the thing it copies from goes away. lmao.

The same plot shows genzedong posts rocketing after the subreddit is banned. It was a life raft community. That means the thing it was meant to do happenes. This fact is never mentioned, it is jist characterized as "when banned extremists go elsewhere", wow what an analysis.

Monthly Perspective Analysi

These people are so lazy they didn't even do their own sentiment modeling. They just sent posts to a Google API and accepted the results for things like "severe profanity" and "identity attack". What those mean is never questioned. Is this article full of identity attacks because it uses the term tankie? The authors could never think to ask that kind of question.

Anyways this laziness reminds me of many academics I've known. Real grifters that think highly of themselves but always take the easiest path that sounds high tech because it means more funding and press.

They do not provide a single example of how a given post correlates to a given set of topic scores, sentiments, etc. The results are simply accepted. This is classic lazy academic behavior when it comes to "analyzing" social media. What they actually want to do, but never state, is to produce some pretty graphics by turning a mass corpus of posts into categorized numbers, sometimes as a network, and to say some meaningless garbage about the results to fit some agenda.

Topic Analysis

Here they seem to have actually run some models, though again using someone else's package. The choice of this package is never explained. They do mention its basic attributes in order to embed like 5 more pointless citations, though.

The top topic from their fancy analysis? "ridic, neatza, totes". Wow, you sure did extract data! So meaningful! The second? "xd, tysm, ja" Lmao. The third? "dprk, korea, kim" finally, a topic! The tankies discussed the DPRK around this time! Amazing! Anything more to say about that? No? Cool! Great work!

They then say that the users of a communist country support the DPRK and China (but how!?) and cherry pick an example of antisemitism that was from a user that was banned 5 years ago, i.e. long before this article was written. They do not mention that this person was banned nor that the antisemitism was called out. They leave it implied that banned comments are actually representative of the community. Liberal academics premise their existence on incuriosity and dishonesty.

It is interesting to note that there are 3 years of more recent material that they did not "analyze". Conspicuously they only cover a couple months after the genzedong and genzhou quarantines/bans despite showing and modeling years prior. It is conspicuous. They do have more recent citations, however. I wonder if they were just lazy or incompetent or if they have just been shopping this thing around for 3 years and couldn't be asked to update their plots.

Either way, this is basically incomoetent Masters student level work that should never have been published. It waa presented at some recent conference.

Imagine putting your name on this embarrassing shit as a serious academic and using the word tankie in your paper.

It's larping, but as academics. At least the far right larp as like navy seals or militia that go outside lmao. Instead liberals larp as academics without any of the seriousness or rigor.

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

What an incredible sentence

left-wing extremist (specifically, tankie)

I am a serious academic

no mention of hexbear

are we cooked

I'm going to do an intensive scientific analysis of the inside of my toilet after I decentralize my bowels into it.

It’s unbelievably easy to blend into a tankie crowd, there is absolutely no nuance required. I’d even go so far as to say that a nuanced take of any kind actually makes you stick out.

West = Every single thing Bad. China = every single thing Perfect.

Master that formula and you’re golden.

lol. We definitely don't criticize China on here at all. I guess because our criticism is ironically more nuanced than "Tin Omen 1984 authoritarians", they think it's not critical enough.

Lemmygrad.ml from its inception in 2019 to one month after the migration of left-wing extremist (specifically, tankie)

I'm a very serious academic

uses "tankies" unironically

deeply unserious

What the hell are some of these keyword groupings???

Discussing the contentious topic of checks notes "xd, tysm, ja"...

Also throwing in "Jews, Jewish" with "Israel" while not including "zionism, zionists" is very telling on themselves.

Using a temporal transformer analysis of us conflating Judiasm and Zionism along with nuanced polar binary scoring according to a decentralized Nazis Are Taking Over modeling standards with a specific emphasis on migration patrerns.

ay mates, ~~lelkins~~ lemmygrad person here

i find the keywords hilarious, how the fuck are the top words just romanian slang for "good morning" AND the romanian word for "raise or carry something"? i could've said "lol i did that" but i barely speak romanian here

also lmao tankie, loool taonkie look we are smart we use words like TENCHI end REDFAȘ

don't professional research papers require professional research words? i wasn't allowed to write short versions of "do not" or "was not" in my uni paper!!

also what do they mean by toxic? if i was the same way with the same shitposts but on reddit for example, i'd be given death threats becAUSE THAT FUCKING HAPPENED TO ME EVERY TIME I WAS IN PUBLIC AS A LIBERAL BACK IN THE DAY

THIS IS THE LEAST TOXIC PLACE IF YOU ARE A NICE PERSON. IF I WAS POSTING MY DRAWINGS ANYWHERE BUT HERE AND LEMMYGRAD I'D BE PUT IN A CRINGE COMPILATION, OKAY?! GOD. DAMMIT.

No hexbear?

I'm pretty sure I remember seeing this two years ago and it's the same authors, makes it even funnier that they're still doing this lmao.