We didn’t make the list

what even is this study, did anyone proofread this shit

As additional evidence that tankies’ are indeed supporters of AES countries

ah, the are that belongs to tankies, of course

A Previous study [86] on 2021 Cuban Protests found that r/GenZedong supports Cuban regime while condemning those who oppose it

randomly capitalized “Previous”, [the] Cuban Protests, [the] Cuban regime

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anyway, some other great bits:

r/sendinthetanks may be more geared towards discussion and debate among its members. This could lead to a lower PageRank score, as it is not as actively linked to or referenced by other subreddits.

damn, they just called us out for not reading theory

It is listed by r/Sino as a subreddit that can be crossposted from, likely indicating a pro-China bias among its members.

you want to be informed about China? Well guess that means you have a pro-China bias, tankie!

we can see that r/democrats is positioned between r/Capitalism, r/progressive, r/SocialDemocracy, r/DemocraticSocialism, and r/Conservative. This may seem odd at first glance, but considering that these ideologies represent current US politics

the US, famed for its many demsoc and socdem parties

Additionally, even though one of the closest subreddits to r/conservatives is r/liberal, they are still relatively distant.

lol. lmao

When we look at the RTPRs, we find that they generally focus more on recent, state-level political events compared to other far-left communities.

news-megathread heads keep on winning, WE LOVE THE NEWS FOLKS

This is further supported by their lower RTPRs for social issues, e.g., police, climate change, healthcare, housing, gun control, unions, and taxes compared to other far-left communities.

or, you know, maybe many tankies just happen to not be fucking American, so your fancy model, likely trained on a predominantly American dataset, can only recognize discussion of “social issues” when it’s specifically referencing domestic American politics

tankies mention Stalin nearly twice as often as Lenin

These pairs show that tankies simplify the complexity and diversity of Jewish identity and also the establishment and development of the State of Israel. Furthermore, this usage of Zionism disregards the historical and ongoing discrimination that non-European Jews have faced within Israel

no, you see, me brutally murdering this Palestinian child is actually for very deep and complex reasons

We find that tankies have a higher proportion of shared news outlets from “Revisionist World Powers,” which comprise state-sponsored or statecontrolled outlets from China and Russia … , these findings may suggest that tankies prefer sources of misleading information compared to other far-left communities

using non-American news sources? um, actually, that’s disinformation

Despite the robustness of our methodology

lol, fucking totally robust study here folks

Our dataset also has a notable lack of far-right communities. For example, there is no representation of fascism or alt-right communities.

oh, YOU FUCKING THINK THAT YOUR STUDY OF EXTREMISM MIGHT BE SOMEWHAT AFFECTED BY YOU JUST NOT STUDYING, LIKE, MOST OF IT?!

While the explosion in online extremism has mostly been on the right side of the political spectrum, the overall political leaning of researchers is on the left side of things [87].

damn those leftist professors, it’s their fault we’re not paying enough attention to the tankie threat! And you know what that fucking [87] citation is? “Pippa Norris. 2021. Cancel culture: Myth or reality? Political Studies”

There was also a citation for our boy

redsails is not Chinese. Roderic Day is… I’m not sure but I think maybe Peruvian origin who grew up in Canada

The top 1000 domains worldwide were excluded. That’s obviously why hexbear didn’t make it.

Also, I’m fine with us flying under the radar. High profile means feds and more wreckers, and I have no desire to deal with that nonsense.

lmao i hate these ghouls that conduct and share research on online groups/forums, when they also have a clear disdain and severe misunderstanding of the groups/forums they study

currently skimming through the paper and it’s painful

i also can’t help but feel like the liberal use of “tankies” was an intentional decision by the authors to drive up the most clicks (and inevitable citations) on this slop

Their working definition of tankies.

“Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.”

is it not painfully vague, almost to the point that it is practically meaningless at differentiating some leftists (or leftist forums) from others?

edit: more thoughts:

• calling your paper “data-driven” isn’t an excuse to approach your research project with like zero theoretical (or nuanced) knowledge about (but a strong negative bias towards) the groups in your study

• the paper was getting cool-ish until they started interpreting the results of their “Misalignment Analysis”… This section is very cringe (re: “Acceptance of CCP Narratives”, allegations of anti-Semitism, and preference state-sponsored media (but only the bad kind (not american) state sponsored media). The sections before this, where the paper was more predominantly data-driven, seemed actually OK.

• the toxicity analysis seems dumb as fuck because it doesn’t account for all the ruiners that come in to pick fights and get banned immediately. Like when lemmygrad.ml was growing its user base, the authors suggest that the “tankies” were at their most toxic, but I suspect that spike in toxicity was driven by new users picking fights and reactions from older users to these newers…

my new favourite part of the paper:

Our dataset also has a notable lack of far-right communities. For example, there is no representation of fascism or alt-right communities

BASED scholar DEBUNKS horseshoe theory and SILENCES all red-fash allegations