The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
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 relies on this website to calculate both.
The measurements still seem somewhat subjective. You can test how “toxic” comments are here: https://perspectiveapi.com/
The part saying that they ‘observe that tankies attack the identities of Asians, Arabs, Hindus, Mexicans, Africans, and Whites in more than 20% posts mentioning these identities’ was what irritated me the most, because it is a serious accusation and yet it’s so poorly substantiated. (Notice how no quotes are given as examples.) It’s almost as if they relied on a computer programme to do all of their homework for them.
I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.
Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.
