the_dunk_tank

Data-driven Understanding

Zero data

very good paper, well done

However, when it comes to everyday societal challenges that are usually points of interest for the left wing—like policing, climate change, healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights—tankies seem less engaged.

Really huge "I clicked on a couple of memes and did no further investigation" energy radiating from this sentence.

When far-right groups like QAnon and r/The_Donald were deplatformed, they migrated to alternative platforms like voat.co, Parler, and Gettr. Facing restrictions on Reddit, tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou, transitioned to Lemmygrad.ml, a Marxist/Leninist online platform. Tankies’ move not only made them dominant voices on Lemmygrad.ml but also seemed to amplify the overall toxic tone on the platform.

crackers legitimately do not realize the 'tankies'(these settler failsons' words, not mine) BUILT that one. What do I expect from settler failson 'academics' who can't do a lick of research, can't do a lick of legible statistics formatting, and can only verbalize what Uncle Sam put inside them tho. Death to the settler empire, hope I live to help tear it down.

This idea is strengthened by reports of r/GenZedong (a tankie subreddit) showing aggression towards Uyghurs online.

Oh gee, that sounds awful! I wonder what that was about?

clicks through

"As an American, I am very proud of working for the US government in Guantanamo..."

I love they don’t even label every color they use

• "Race traitor" definition of tankie (AES citizens aren't described as tankies, Communist leaders today and historically aren't identified as tankies. only westerners who admire the former categories can be tankies)
• Study is entirely focused to reddit communities (a platform used exclusively by losers and cranks)
• "Data Driven understanding" but it's just the authors own conjured impression that Tankies care more about "state-driven events" and not "policing, climate change, healthcare, housing". Author should choose a random PSL branch instagram and see what they post about if they believe this.
• "Acceptance of X narratives" - making a conclusion based on analysis. Fuck, just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean you can write them as if they're not reasoning, coherent, analytical agents. this baseline applies to chuds too if one was to seriously try and understand them also.

Aahaha these fuckin losers, these nerds get a load of this

What is a Tankie? The term tankie has seen several shifts in its connotation over the years. Originally, it was a pejorative label for communists who supported the Soviet Union’s interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Yet, its contemporary application is much broader. Today, the term refers not only to pro-Soviet hardliners but also to those who back China’s policies on matters such as the Uyghur genocide and the Hong Kong protests. A recent study by Petterson portrays tankies as: “regard[ing] past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.”

Just pathetic. What is this CIA-ass website? I've never seen or heard of it before.

Anyway, extremism is when you take a principled stance against verifiable, undeniable genocide

They often opt to use the nomenclature ‘Communist Party of China (CPC)’—Beijing’s preferred language—over the more colloquial ‘CCP’ [...] Overall, there’s a clear inclination in tankies’ dialogues towards viewpoints aligned with the CCP (or CPC in their vocabulary).

Brain legitimately spilling out of their ears.

We find the tankies’ usage of ‘Zelensky’ aligns with the r/DemocraticSocialism’s usage of ‘Trump’. This parallel suggests a certain scepticism or opposition towards Ukrainian sovereignty within the tankie community.

Wow! I had no idea it suggested this. Care to explain why opposition to a Western puppet who shakes the hands of Nazis and wears their merchandise means scepticism/opposition towards Ukrainian sovereignty (in a data-driven way)? Of course not. The "parallel" drawn is so shallow and meaningless. "This subreddit doesn't like Trump, these people don't like Zelensky, waow is there a common link here in that both of these groups don't like separate people?" And then nothing is done with this comparison?? Filling the word count to the brim.

If I actually wrote something this bad and shallow I would at least forget to put my real name on it.

Rather than highlighting concerns over detention and genocide, they portray the situation in a less severe light, e.g.:

Go back to watching Vaush

This is the person calling you a tankie

Hexbear has fallen, lemmygrad is the vanguard. I will now delete my account here, clearly this webserver is for libs.

explores online spaces where modern tankies gather and spread their extremist ideology

I am vomittting extremistly.

Fucking nazi fucks. Imagine thinking GenZedong is extreme. The liberal encounters someone with beliefs and convictions. They cannot comprehend it. Their world shatters in to a kaleidescope of possibility. Horrified, shaken, they cling to the only thing they know; change is impossible and anyone who wants to change anything is insane and evil.

Their positioning, further to the left than subreddits like r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism

I like how they use informedtankie as their first example of a tankie space, then act like /r/communism and /r/socialism are somehow less so? All three literally share moderators, and have shared many former moderators who are now spread across hundreds of projects on the site.

It's so fucking badly researched. They know literally nothing about socialists or the fact that among marxists there's very little issue with "tankies". There is no separation or division. They seem to think that there is.

They'd have a fit if they realised Corbyn upholds AES, advertises the Black Panthers, or Dianne Abbot defends Mao on national tv, or John Mcdonnel waving around Mao's little red book in parliament. Like wtf do these people not know what marxists are? It's like they have literally never encountered actual socialists before and really only have a particularly vague understanding of any of this shit. I can't think of a single marxist figure in the mainstream (for a marxist) that wouldn't fit their definitions of "tankie" if they ever actually inquired as to what any given marxist believes. The only real difference between any of us is our position on China diverging between ML, Trot and Maoists, which isn't really that divisive at all.

The only group that anyone really has any beef with are the gonzaloites.

New political compass dropped

Tech companies must recognise and respond to the adeptness of groups like tankies in evading moderation efforts. Developing advanced content moderation tools that can detect and mitigate the spread of extremist rhetoric, irrespective of its political orientation, should be a priority. Collaborative endeavours between researchers and tech platforms can lead to the development of more robust and unbiased moderation systems.

HALT CITIZEN, YOUR POST DOES NOT SUPPORT THE NEOLIBERAL CENTRIST NARRATIVE, YOUR FICO SCORE HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 100 POINTS

Utkucan Balci (@utkucanbalci) is a Ph.D. Candidate at Binghamton University and a student researcher at iDRAMA (The International Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis) Lab. His current research interests include understanding online communities and how they break up into more divergent subcommunities.

Michael Sirivianos (@msirivia) Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and Informatics and the Dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at the Cyprus University of Technology. He serves on the Board of the CYENS Centre of Excellence and researches ways to help social media users tell lies apart. His research interests include the trust-aware design of distributed systems, device-centric authentication, federated identity management, discrimination based on personal data, cyber safety, transactional workload scalability, and measurement of blockchain systems

Jeremy Blackburn (@jhblackb) is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Binghamton University. Jeremy is broadly interested in data science, with a focus on large-scale measurements and modelling. His award-winning research into understanding toxic behaviour, hate speech, and fringe and extremist Web communities has been covered in the press by The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Infowars, among others.

Assuming at least the last two of these people are libertarians who think the left is the real menace to be worried about. Imagine putting in your bio that your work has been covered by fucking Infowars.

"The gang confirms all their biases and proves that everything they want to believe is true"

"Facts don't care about your feelings."

"All of my feelings are now facts."

I'm here to boykiss and end capitalism and I'm all out of men to kiss. >:3

Wonder why they couldn’t get their paper published in an actual journal

tankies appear to be deeply invested in state-driven political events, often at the expense of grassroots societal issues.

In an article published on a "think tank" with ties to the State Department and which broadcasts imperialist propaganda against enemy states.

The paper is bad and incoherent. For a supposedly data driven paper it's mostly about the authors' subjective experiences and a selection of anecdotal-grade posts. The few graphs they do choose are unintelligible and aren't even used to support any particular arguments. It'd be a sweet gig to work for a think tank like this where you can just write garbage and collect your NED/oligarch-backed check, but I have a little bit of self-respect.

"Frequently target muslims and jews in their posts" (another unfounded assertion from the data guys)

Lemmygrad dunked on this a couple weeks ago: https://hexbear.net/post/1900390

The actual whitepaper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.06981.pdf

oh yeah, extremist and dangerous rhetoric from the left! They're against expanding the war in ukraine that might kill us all! They disagree with the butchery in Palestine! oh so dangerous, especially since they have ZERO power in existing governance in ANY western country.

remember to call you congressman and demand the blood of the world's underclass!