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.
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?
we did it boys, soon we are officially on the FBI watch list
I’m unironically on lemmygrad to ensure my partner can never work at a defense contractor 😍
Don’t have a partner that would ever consider that
Me reading this:
It sure is lovely that the “AI” “Revolution” has given hacks a bunch of hard to audit but scientific-sounding metrics for them to apply however they want.
Armchair peer review time: I’d love to see them introducing a control group for their “toxicity” model by including subs from their other identified clusters. How can you know what it means for tankies to be millions of billions toxic if you don’t have baselines? I do like how they agree with r/liberal and r/conservative being in the same cluster though. On the domain analysis I’d require them to also include the total number of articles and not just the percentages, which I’d bet would give a fun graph.
Overall, I’ve read less funny and more informative parody papers. For the AI nerds, this one might be fun.
🤣🤣🤣 I’m in tears. Actual tears.
I’d love to see them introducing a control group for their “toxicity” model by including subs from their other identified clusters. How can you know what it means for tankies to be millions of billions toxic if you don’t have baselines?
Ironically(?) the funding is to develop a machine learning algorithm not to spot and moderate racism but to spot and moderate the least racist of any two examples. Which means, the project is to develop a comparative model but they haven’t thought about using comparison within the research itself. Meanwhile, real scholars get fired from all over the place for being in unions and demanding a living wage.
It sure is lovely that the “AI” “Revolution” has given hacks a bunch of hard to audit but scientific-sounding metrics for them to apply however they want.
I’m slogging through it right now and coming to similar assessments. “With enough Machine Learning shenanigans, I can arrive at whatever conclusion I want!”
They’re tired of gaslighting people into becoming liberals, now they’re doing it with machines. Whoever thought of letting misinformation giants like Google “teach” “AI” should be fired
at.
I did an in-depth ‘debunk’ of this study.
I want to highlight the most egregious part of it, to me at least. Here’s an excerpt from my article:
As we find later in Section 5.4, tankies have the most proportion of posts with high identity attack against Jews in the far-left community.
??? Let’s pull up that section quickly:
The Perspective API [92] is a widely used [9, 12, 26] tool for measuring toxicity. Although it has limitations, e.g., there are issues of bias and questions of performance when encountering conversation patterns that it was not trained on, at scale it provides a decent measure for comparison between online communities.
They used an API tool to analyze comments on the tankie subreddits. They specifically mention that it has limitations if it wasn’t trained on certain conversation patterns. The Perspective website doesn’t mention it being trained on Reddit comments or comments in leftist communities. This is junk science, of course.
Finally, we observe that tankies frequently target Muslims and Jews in their posts.
I’m not about to dig too deep into the way this API determines what constitutes an Identity Attack, since this study doesn’t even attempt to elaborate on it, but I’m going to assume that if it detects ‘hateful words’ in the same comment as a ‘named entity’ like Jew or Muslim, it just assumes the comment is attacking that entity.
Here’s the problem. A comment like this:
“Zionists are pieces of shit for assuming all Jews support Israel”
or this:
“Implying that the US gives a fuck about Muslims when they criticize China is delusional”
would likely be considered by this bot to be an attack against Jews or Muslims. Curiously, this report doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence of these attacks on Jews or Muslims. But, in the ‘C.1 Qualitative Validation’ section, they do give some examples of the toxic comments that this bot identified. Not a single one is specifically about Jews or Muslims.
Here’s two examples:
To me, boarding schools serve as schools for potential terrorists, and China’s approach seems more humane than the US’s
and
Zionism equates to Fascism.
Neither comment is an Identity Attack against Muslims or Jews. The first is talking specifically about the small portion of Uyghurs that China has identified as being radicalized, not all Muslims. The second is about Zionism, which as this study pointed out, does not mean all Jews. Neither one contains the word ‘Jew’, or ‘Muslim’, anyway.
Hmm, I wonder why they omitted that. Because the truth doesn’t fit the ‘tankie bad’ narrative they are pushing? This is research misconduct, pure and simple, and this singular example of evidentiary omission should cause any non-tankies reading this study to dismiss it in its entirety. But of course, it won’t.
LESGOOOO #LEMMYGRADSWEEP ✊✊✊🫡🫡🫡
also: genocide, xinjiang, camps, communism, no, inshallah, socialism, socialist, is, the, of, korea, north, kim, dprk, korean, media, chen, falun, gong, news, comrade, thanks, you, comrades, thank, thank, thanks, you, nice, good, fascism, fascist, fascists, the, is, ussr, soviet, the, art, of, lol, wtf, real, holy, wait, ok, hope, wish, you, sorry, fucking, bot, fuck, sometimes, beep, china, nukes, us, war, the, joke, submission, guideline, r/socialism, this, cuba, cuban, castro, the, fidel, lgbt, trans, gay, the, and, vote, voting, caucus, party, green, source, u/vredditdownloader, context, picture, where
i am now a master tankie 🫡🫡🫡
"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.
Yes, this is also a point. They still attempt to speak on this topic, because the write, that this paper is a “data-driven understanding” of “left-wing extremism”. Absolute stupid
This exactly. This article is nothing but brainworm-inducing propaganda masquerading as “academic research” to seem more authoritative and valid.
I don’t know how anyone can say “tankie” with a straight face, let alone publish a research paper about the “tankie” phenomenon.
I can’t believe they did this and then, by the looks of it, crowd-sourced a definition from reactionary corners of the fediverse. They’re not giving western higher education a good name, are they?
They’re really not sending their best people.
current socialist systems
Stalin
Damn if only
The Juche necromancers are trying their best, and that’s all we can ask for.
He really doesn’t want the job again.
But we need him, we REALLY need him
USSR, soviet, the, art, of
Nvivo is a comrade. Nice.
Edit, #10 is:
capitalism, yes, why, capitalist, yep
And tbf, this does about sum up most of our conversations.
Why is “the” listed 8 times? Do we really say the that much?
Well, yes. But also, as long as most comments has “the” at least once, “the” will be listed.
Orange gallbladder golfcart
As most used word. If anything it shows how bad the compiling of the data is. “the” is basically white noise and they have not even filtered it out.
We say thank you quite a lot though it seems
comrade, thanks. You comrade, thank.
I didn’t actually notice that! I got as as the word “the”, and tuned out. It’s hilarious that words like “thanks” and “sorry” rate so highly on this very toxic extremist community.
“inshallah” - I laughed harder than I should have.
“Chen” - The master gets his deserved mention, I see.
and lots of thanking - Very toxic, yes,yes.
i’m thinking about their claim that “the predominant topic of discussion” among tankies is the uyghur “genocide.” like bro there’s 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.
I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:
A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.
Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.
Even then, most of the time, it’s because someone comes along and says, “You claim that China has built railways but don’t you know about Xinjiang, which means there can’t be any semiconductors”.
Tbh, I see more posts on here about the war in Ukraine than Xinjiang lately. We only ever talked about it because liberals were obsessed with creating a genocide narrative. Now that their short attention spans have moved on to the next act of dehumanization, why would we bother talking about something we know isn’t real? The only reason we ever have to discuss half the mainstream topics about China is to deconstruct the myths around them.
Not that these “researchers” would know that.
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
“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.
Fake news. You don’t see many people around here calling it the 中国共产党 now do you? :)
The funny thing is i can’t read Chinese but this is one of the few expressions i have learned to recognize and know how to pronounce (still can’t write it though, i need to practice that sometime). Guess that makes me “brainwashed by the CCP”.
You mean brainwashed by the 中国共产党 right? /s
I’ve studied Japanese so it’s kind of cheating that it looks obvious to me what it’s supposed to mean without studying Chinese. Don’t ask me to pronounce it the Chinese way though :P
As an aside, it’s interesting to note the different simplifications:
Traditional Chinese: 中國共產黨 Japanese: 中国共産党 Simplified Chinese: 中国共产党
Good point we are all westerners using the preferred western CPC.
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.
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!
I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.
It’s quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.
I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I’ll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as “positivist reductionism” is a “hard science guy” who thinks he[1] doesn’t have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because “numbers will tell me everything I need to know”.
[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it’s usually a guy.
I don’t know if humanities could have salvaged some of this paper. They just make so many assumptions out of thin air and expect the reader to just go along with them, like this here:
The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions.
This is a specific claim, that in other words says “tankies support the Soviet Union, and as such they support the Russian Federation”. But no source accompanies this claim, no definitions either, and ultimately the next sentence contradicts this claim – they started from the conclusion, the starting point being them wanting to prove “Acceptence [sic] of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine” (yes the typo was originally there).
But the two are two entirely different claims, it does not logically follow that support for the USSR means support of Russia in the war. They just gloss over that though and start talking about their “word pairs” as if that proved anything lol
This is divination for computer scientists.
I’ve never written a scientific paper before but I would be ashamed to actually put this out for my peers to review.
lemmygrad is the 4th most popular “tankie” website
based
TO THE MOON
INVEST NOW
As an anarchist, I’m betting on a short (yes I own stocks, it funds the revolution, you tankies would do this too if you were actually socialists like me and realised the revolution doesnt come from your well wishes and online posting). As more and more people realies how tankeis are actually not socialists but authoritarian red fascists, they will naturally abandon this label and it will plummet in the graph. its just human anture.
We are da bestest stonks.
Can’t post the image because of the maintenance but basically we are the biggest Marxist forum, since the other web sites are stuff that’s mostly not even Leninist, stuff like marxist.org, archive.vn, and news sites.
Marxists.org being tankie is the hot take I didn’t really need. First they came for Stalin, then Lenin, then Marx. Eventually even Trotsky Encyclopaedia and raddle will join their ranks in the tanks.
Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, Engels, Luxemburg - all tankies. Leo Iljitsch Stalinzedong and Karl Engels von Liebknecht killed 30 Billions people.
No joke, I remember writing absolute bullshit on facebook years ago to troll liberals. I said things like that Lenin kept slaves and bribed the workes with beer, to gain support. Guess what, their only problem were, that I said, that communism killed 5 billion people. This number was “a little bit to high” lol
You fool, you weren’t supposed to count the 1,000,000,000 Ukrainians that Stalin’s spoon killed as people /s
I said things like that Lenin kept slaves and bribed the workes with beer, to gain support.
Are you Ferdynand Ossendowski???
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.
Also Vox, a zionist cumrag, and some artsy cumrag that screams “CIA money”
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.
There’s certainly an irony to academia being run by (mostly) liberals who would rightly scoff at any real research having such shoddy sourcing but those same types of libs blindly accepting CIA and it’s network of bullshit narratives.
Even from a selfish pro-US stance people should be wary of those who state such high standards for what is considered credible sourcing but throw that away as soon as it favors the way they’ve been told to perceive the world. “This confirm China bad! Sound good!” They’re compromising their ethics and morality of course but it makes you wonder what else is compromised if it all it took was a a shitty media narrative to convince them Xi is personally shooting Taiwanese civilians right now.
Yeah the rigor is only centered when it’s convenient or empowering. My department has been begging scholars that are critical of China to become faculty for awhile. Although one of the professors is skeptical of criticisms of China that leave out the context of western crimes and the broader global system that China did not create, but the broader department and the university seems eager to get someone that is explicitly anti china in their research objectives.
To me it’s hardly impossible to find things China is doing “wrong” around the world. But I am convinced there is a lot of contrived bullshit and misinformation and a lot of it does not stand up to scrutiny, but few actually criticize these narratives. The shit with Sri Lanka for exampleis repeated ad nauseum and its shoddy as hell imo.
It’s like Whack-A-mole with all those bozos.
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.
