Honestly I could have told them the history of Lemmygrad myself, no need for machine learning and data-driven APIs, you could just ask somebody lol. Can I get some of that 500k?
What if they've been here, asking all along, and we've been shoo-ing them off as libs?
Can someone please explain "...more Stalinist than Leninist" because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish
Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR "managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs" he is known for his "... comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China ..." and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,
"We perform a set of quantitative analyses that reveal the relationship between tankies, other far-left communities, leftists, feminists, and capitalists." I feel I need no more explination, the bold was added by me
At this point I am less than a page in and I feel like I am reading too far into this but I am comitted to this and I will read and review this ... and likely reply to here... but this looks to be the dumbest acidemic paper I have ever read, ever, and trust me I have read some really stupid ones
Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR “managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs” he is known for his “… comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China …” and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,
You can find the source on libgen. Here's the sources for the preface:
1 Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff, ‘Xinjiang Authorities Sending Uyghurs to Work in China’s Factories, Despite Coronavirus Risks,’ Radio Free Asia (27 February 2020).
2 SCMP Reporters, ‘China Plans to Send Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang Re-Education Camps to Work in Other Parts of Country,’ South China Morning Post (2 May 2020).
3 Keegan Elmer, ‘China says it will ‘Normalise’ Xinjiang Camps as Beijing Continues Drive to Defend Policies in Mainly Muslim Region,’ South China Morning Post (9 December 2019).
4 Erkin, ‘Boarding Preschools For Uyghur Children “Clearly a Step Towards a Policy of Assimilation”: Expert,’ Radio Free Asia (6 May 2020).
5 Gulchehre Hoja, ‘Subsidies For Han Settlers “Engineering Demographics” in Uyghur-Majority Southern Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia (13 April 2020).
So... SCMP and RFA.
And the first ten sources for the introduction:
1 Emily Feng, ‘China Targets Muslim Uyghurs Studying Abroad,’ Financial Times (1 August 2017).
2 See Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (14 March 2017); Magha Rajagopalan, ‘This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,’ Buzzfeed News (17 October 2017).
3 Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (21 September 2017).
4 Nathan VanderKlippe, ‘Frontier Injustice: Inside China’s Campaign to “Re-educate” Uyghurs,’ The Globe and Mail (9 September 2017); HRW, ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’ (10 September 2017); Eset Sulaiman, ‘China Runs Region-wide Re-education Camps in Xinjiang for Uyghurs and Other Muslims,’ RFA (11 September 2017).
5 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘China’s Reeducation Camps are Beginning to Look Like Concentration Camps,’ Vox (24 October 2018).
6 See ‘Inside the Camps Where China Tries to Brainwash Muslims Until They Love the Party and Hate Their Own Culture,’ Associated Press (17 May 2018); David Stavrou, ‘A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on Inside,’ Haaretz (17 October 2019).
7 See Amie Ferris-Rotman, ‘Abortions, IUDs and Sexual Humiliation: Muslim Women who Fled China for Kazakhstan Recount Ordeals,’ Washington Post (5 October 2019); Eli Meixler, ‘“I Begged Them to Kill Me.” Uighur Woman Tells Congress of Torture in Chinese Internment Camps,’ TIME (30 November 2018); Ben Mauk, ‘Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State,’ The Believer (1 October 2019).
8 Shoret Hoshur ‘Nearly Half of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Hotan Targetted for Re-education Camps,’ RFA (9 October 2017).
9 Sean R. Roberts, ‘Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century,’ Fair Observer (17 December 2018).
10 See Zenz and Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State.’
Zenz, RFA, and Financial Times.
Not exactly promising.
If i turned in something like this to my proff with those sorces, I would be down listed a grade minum. I cannot belive that passes as research.
Can someone please explain “…more Stalinist than Leninist” because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish
This is trotskyist political view, considering how much time they spent agitating, it was somewhat accepted by the radlib part of mainstream. Btw. it's telling how of entire ton of trotskist propaganda mainstream accepted exactly the anti-AES parts.
Whoever the people are that got their comments published on page 33 and 34 deserve a special flair (does Lemmy have those?)
Also, it's so funny how the authors keep calling the Communist Party of China the CCP instead of the CPC. For table 10 they had to switch between these keywords because the tankies community is the only one that can get the acronym right LMAO
I almost appreciate the CCP/CPC thing, because it gives me a shorthand as to know whether the upcoming argument will have any merit or just be bullshit.
I still look at their actual argument on their merits, but 95% of the time it has gone exactly the way I expected.
"That’s Isntreal and nah, we don’t endorse Israel." an example of a statement that proves we are evil
and did you not read the paper, us using the correct accronym just proves we are brainwashed by chinese propganda... by assertion
Oh yeah, we use the cHinESe gOveRnMenT's PrEFeRrEd nOmeNClaTurE, so we're misaligned. What a joke. It'd be like calling the USA the AUS and insisting that everyone who gets it right has been manipulated by the US government. Sorry, the SU government.
holy shit you weren't joking, if you ctrl+f lemmygrad we appear in it lmao
edit: I still can't believe this is real, which one of you wrote this paper??
We made it comrades, we're going to get banned from flights
no but it's the funniest thing, it was written by 2 randos from some backwater uni in new york state (not the city), and a third co-author from Cyprus (??? why), and published on arxiv.org which is:
a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,294,594 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
Meaning they found whoever would publish them without asking questions.
Like this thing says the word tankie 71 times, which is an average of 2.5 per page, of course they would not have been published anywhere else lol. If I was their uni honestly I would give these students a talking to because it would reflect really badly on my reputation to let them publish this drivel.
Best part is these mfs are prolly reading us shitposting about them now
don't say shitposting, you're gonna add an instance of severe toxicity
Actually, the authors of this are professors from that university, lmao.
They were even given some grants and awards.
Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they're still being reviewed by actual journals, so it's possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.
Hexbear also found this: https://www.hexbear.net/post/279191
Also I'd like to think I did my part getting lemmygrad's numbers up as I was spamming Genzedong with a macro telling people to go here as a lifeboat before and after the quarantine.
Also I love how they didn't connect us to the only real anti-pedophile podcast subreddit (Brace noises) or thedeprogram, guess we don't have that many casual links but if they checked overlap it should be there. Sloppy work on that in addition to all the problems with methodology, definitions, etc. Hilarious tax dollars paid for this though I guess I'd prefer it over actually effort-driven papers and even better it might encourage other lazy anti-communists to cite them, creating a chain of weak links back to a shoddy base that can be knocked away in heavy discourse and leave anti-communists flailing and drifting. Of course the downside is actual policy isn't driven by hard peer reviewed science and part of the purpose of a shoddy paper like this could be to give a cite-able pretext to say private companies on why they need to immediately censor "tankies" and any discourse that their shoddy, shitty, "ai-data-'science'" says is related to that.
I think I'll actually review the paper. Because I think it'll make a great use-case for the argument that you can't automated-sentiment-analysis your way to a cogent political assessment of entire populations. No matter how hard you want to.
A review of the paper. I'll try and update this as I go.
Abstract
Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring left-wing extremism.
Perhaps there is a reason that most of the research on extremism finds itself looking at right-wing examples.
Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an organized response to deplatforming events.
"Relatively high toxicity" screams horseshoe theory. What and/or who the extremists are "being toxic" about matters, not merely that they "are toxic." (Spoiler alert: far-left "extremists" score very high on being "toxic" about fascists and fascism; not exactly a novel observation)
Introduction
The use of social media by extremists is well documented in the press [ 4, 23, 108 ] and has been a heavy focus of the research community [7 , 46, 75 ]. However, almost all recent work has studied right- wing extremists. This concentration can be attributed to several factors. The growing popularity of research on populism, as a result of the increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders globally [ 106 ], has led to a greater abundance of identifiable right-wing extremists online and their substantial impact on society. At the same time, there has been a steady rise in political rhetoric characterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists, scapegoating the far-left for violent activities (e.g., claiming Antifa orchestrated the January 6th Insurrection [ 15], accusing far-left extremists of planning and organizing violence during protests after George Floyd’s death [ 31], and blaming left-wing extremists for setting forest fires in Oregon [51]).
Comparing "increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders" to "a steady rise in political rhetoric charcterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists" is not the comparison the authors think it is. "Actually existing far-right parties and leaders" aren't in the same ballpark as "some people say that some other people are far-left." Further, this doesn't state where that political rhetoric is coming from. So I checked the sources:
- 15 is: "Tommy Beer. 2021. The antifa lie: Conservative lawmakers, pundits push a baseless claim that leftists were behind Capitol Insurrection. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/07/the-antifa-lie-conservative-lawmakers-pundits-push-a-baseless-claim-that-leftists-were-behind-capitol-insurrection/?sh=227140324b8d"
- 31 is: "Miranda Devine. 2020. Nationwide George Floyd riots are the price of liberalism: Devine. https://nypost.com/2020/05/31/george-floyd-riots-are-the-price-of-liberalism-devine/"
- 51 is: "Margot Harris. 2020. Joe Rogan apologized for spreading misinformation about Oregon fires amid Spotify employee backlash. https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-rogan-spotify-apology-oregon-forest-fires-antifa-left-activists-2020-9"
Lo and behold, the "other side" of the far-right extremism coin is... the far-right complaining about the far-left.
many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well. For example, spreading mis- and disinformation from unreputable or overtly biased sources [ 122 ].
That "or" is doing some heavy leg work to try and equivocate between "unreputable" and "overtly biased" sources. Let's see what source 122 is about:
- 122 is: "Richard Stengel. 2020. Domestic disinformation is a growing menace to America. https://time.com/5860215/domestic-disinformation-growing-menace-america/"
And some choice quotes from the article:
Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals.
...
China has now entered the disinformation game in a big way, aggressively seeking to fix blame for the epidemic on the U.S. and it has been regularly highlighting American missteps in coping with the virus.
...
The Super Bowl of disinformation will undoubtedly be the 2020 election. All of the malign actors, the Russians, white extremists, China and Iran will get in on the game.
...
Disinformation created by American fringe groups—white nationalists, hate groups, antigovernment movements, left-wing extremists—is growing.
These are the only quotes in the source that could conceivably have some way of bolstering the claim that "many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well." The first is the closest that comes to support. Alas, it doesn't apply because "partisan liberals" aren't far-left. The next two could only conceivably "apply" in a very hand-wavy "China = far-left" sense (which, as we'll see later, the authors make liberal use of). The last is merely a re-stating of of the claim without supporting evidence.
Not a good start.
Despite the impact of right-wing online extremists, political rhetoric, and a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists, there are essentially no studies of the far-left on social media, let alone far-left extremists.
I think this might be a misprint? As in, it was supposed to read "despite the impact of left-wing online extremists." Because structurally the sentence doesn't make sense otherwise. And also, there is no citation given for "a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists" either. Which is odd, because there are examples you can dig for and cite within the United States, a la the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.
We focus primarily on a large left-wing community known as tankies. Historically, tankies were supporters of hardline Soviet actions [43 ]; more Stalinist than Leninist. The name originates from Soviets using tanks to put down rebellions in eastern Europe [ 34, 50 , 94 , 100 , 105 , 107].
The definition is crude but in the ballpark, excluding the "Stalinist" jab, given that Stalin died in 1953, the Hungarian uprising was in 1956, and Khrushchev was not at all a fan of his predecessor Stalin. Curiously, the authors already are aware of this distinction (Appendix C Misalignment Analysis):
Nonetheless, in cases where keywords possess polarized or disparate meanings, we partition them for specific interpretations within certain communities (e.g., when validating the Stalinist leaning of tankies, we do not put “Khrushchev” and “Stalin” in the same keyword list).
Perhaps different parts of this paper were written in isolation by each of the authors. In any event...
Examining the sources:
- 43 is (libgen link): "Marion Glastonbury. 1998. Children of the Revolution: matters arising. Changing English 5, 1 (1998), 7–16."
- 34 is (libgen link): "Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks. 2019. Anti-fascism/Art/Theory: An introduction to what hurts us. , 271–292 pages."
- 50 is (online source): "John Harris. 2015. Marxism today: the forgotten visionaries whose ideas could save Labour. The Guardian 29 (2015)"
- 94 is (libgen link): "Christina Petterson. 2020. Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies. Brill research perspectives in biblical interpretation 4, 1 (2020), 1–80."
- 100 is (libgen link): "Neil Redfern. 2014. No Friends to the Left: The British Communist Party’s Surveillance of the Far Left, c. 1932–1980. Contemporary British History 28, 3 (2014), 341–360."
- 105 is (libgen link): "Emily Robinson. 2011. New times, new politics: History and memory during the final years of the CPGB. British Politics 6, 4 (2011), 453–478."
- 107 is (libgen link): "Raphael Samuel. 1987. Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part (III). New Left Review 1 (1987), 165."
That is actually a healthy listing of sources. I may or may not come back to review each of them in turn. I've been at this for several hours now :) (TODO)
Somebody’s worried. Let me know when a “left-wing extremist” shoots up a school or invades the capitol. All they did was give me a list of websites to visit.
Not just websites, we'll even recommend books for you to read! Truly, we are the greatest evil.
(An aside: I'm thoroughly impressed with the amount of uncoordinated, ad-hoc, impromptu -- and yet rigorous -- dunking and researching that is going on in this post)
Some would say its more rigorous, and more researching than when into the whole paper.... and if anyone is wondering, yes I am part of the some
Cringe compilation:
Apparently you can measure how toxic comments are on a graph.
This says we are racist against almost every race besides Native Americans.
It says Vaush isn't leftist (true) but then calls his subreddit "far-left."
It's surreal to see the word "tankies" in something that claims to be an academic paper...
I'm glad that we're apparently so popular, though!
Imagine a similar paper on the connection between white people and internet domains. Only instead referring to them as white people, the paper uses the term "cracker".
The whole thing just screams of "Fund me, daddy CIA!"
they where funded by the US government a little over half a million dollars
tankies focus more on state-level political events
In other words, the authors have no idea what they're talking about. We're abstracting to the level of classes, not states. Maybe they focused on the intellectually deprived western Marxist discourse.
Really did feel like a deliberate missing of the whole point, didn't it? Felt like a lot of their data stripped out any context that the posts they were 'analyzing' had; and drew deliberately-misleading takes from their sanitized data. Like, do you know any marxists who make a habit of attacking muslims? Meanwhile, most of the takedowns I see of Amerikans squawking about 'muh chingchang'(i've deadass heard a white person pronounce it that way; imagine these crackers actually learning how to pronounce 'Xinjiang') winds up boiling down to "Oh yeah, 'cause the country that spent fifteen years murdering muslims wholesale in the middle-east, and leaving depleted uranium in the sand to mutate their babies really cares about the Muslims in Xinjiang allasudden."
"Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinctdescription of tankie:
Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc. "
Yes, well recognized, the term is vague and can mean everything or nothing. It does not make sense. There are people who see only the Soviet Union as a successful workers' revolution, but not the rest. For some, China represents revisionism, so does Vietnam, or North Korea, or Cuba, etc. I've met people who are all about Enver Hoxha, everything else is revisionism. That is such an enormous range of different views, yet they are all tankies. I've witnessed Trotskyites beeing called tankies because they are against NATO.
To work with such a stupid definition is absolute nonsense. I myself have been called a tankie often enough, because I keep pointing out that the term has no substance in historical and political discourse. I even never discussed something political. Pointing out, that this term is stupid is enough to be a tankie - my experience.
The authors are not qualified to speak on this professionally seeing their degrees and expertise is in tech and computer science, not political science or philosophy.
I don’t know how anyone can say “tankie” with a straight face, let alone publish a research paper about the “tankie” phenomenon.
Michael Sirivianos' grandpa took part in a right-wing extremist ultranationalist coup in Cyprus, which led to the Turkish invasion. He is suspected to be involved in a genocidal incident that was covered up. His uncle was a right-wing political leader and when he was the President of the Parliament in Cyprus, he was involved in the golden passports scandal (see this excellent Al Jazeera undercover report which initiated the investigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj18cya_gvw). His position in the University of Cyprus was "arranged" by his uncle when he was Parliament President.
lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website
based
hey admins can we keep this permanently pinned, it's so fucking funny
boy howdy, this """study""" entirely lacks an understanding of "tankie" positions.
We, according to them, are more toxic when talking about propaganda that's constantly pushed in our faces - often in conversations that had nothing to do with that propaganda. Gee, I wonder why that would be. Why would people who have to repeatedly explain anti-communism to anti-communists want to let off steam with like-minded people, who also have to deal with the same exact thing? Dumbass takes from this """study"""
Also, I'm betting the people who did this study are going to come find this post and use it to prove themselves right, but all they'll really prove is that they think it's the fault of the bees when a person gets stung after poking the nest.
Y'all are number one in my heart though. 🖤🖤🖤🖤
Red Sails is pretty great.
Comradeship // Freechat
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities