How Do Tankies Speak? A Misalignment Analysis | HackerNoon

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Background & Related Work

3 Data

3.1 Identifying Tankie Subreddits

3.2 Identifying Ideology Subreddits and 3.3 Post Collection

4 User-Base Analysis and 4.1 Graph Construction & Community Detection

4.2 Community Growth

4.3 User Migrations Over Time

5 Content Analysis and 5.1 What do tankies talk about?

5.2 Who are tankies talking about?

5.3 Misalignment Analysis

5.4 Toxicity Analysis

5.5 Domain Analysis

5.6 Lemmygrad Analysis

6 Discussion & Conclusion and 6.1 Limitations

6.2 Implications & future work, and References

A DATA

B NAMED ENTITIES

C MISALIGNMENT ANALYSIS

D DOMAIN ANALYSIS

5.3 Misalignment Analysis

So far, we have discovered that tankies focus more on state-level political events and less on social issues and ideological principles than other far-left communities. In this section, we investigate the differences in word usage between tankies and other far-left communities.

Given the broad spectrum of beliefs represented in left-wing extremism, capturing their complexity with basic tools is a challenging task [67]. To overcome this challenge, we employ the concept of alignment. This involves mapping the word usage in tankies to that of other far-left communities via multidimensional word embeddings, thereby providing a deeper understanding of their unique characteristics.

Aligning Multidimensional Word Embeddings. Understanding the language usage in polarized communities is challenging due to their distinct vocabularies for identical concepts. E.g., Democrats and Republicans are political adversaries. Thus, a Democrat might say that “Republicans are America’s greatest threat” (and vice versa), making direct comparisons of their language less useful when it comes to polarizing topics. To address this, KhudaBuksh et al. [69] formulate the problem as a form of translation between two groups using the same natural language. While not every “translation” is as clear-cut as the previous toy example, this technique has seen refinement [82] to capture more complex, multidimensional aspects of ideological differences. As such, it emerges as an ideal tool for distinguishing disparities between tankies and other left-wing ideologies.

Preprocessing and Training. Following the same method as [82], we tokenize each comment for each far-left community corpus, remove formatting tokens and hyperlinks, make all characters lowercase, and common bigrams and trigrams into single tokens to catch the possible usage of organization names. To stabilize the word embeddings, we oversample sentences from non-tankie far-left subreddits until they reach the same size as tankies. We then train Word2Vec skip-gram models [81] for each far-left community using 100 dimensions and a maximum vocabulary of 30,000 words. To account for oversampling, we adjust the threshold for the number of times a word must appear – which is set to 5 for tankies – by multiplying it with the size increase factor for other far-left communities. We choose the top 5,000 words from the shared vocabulary of each community pair as “anchor words.” This is based on the findings of Milbauer et al.[82], who showed that this selection provides similar accuracy to using the entire shared vocabulary. To translate the embeddings between the communities, we employ the MultiCCA implementation from sci-kit-learn [90], as it gives the best accuracy.

Discovering Misalignments & Conceptional Homomorphisms. We look for misaligned and conceptually homomorphic word pairs (with tankies as the source community) that have a cosine similarity of more than 0.5, and categorize the pairs that reflect polarized meanings, informed by both the literature and our previously presented results. We exclude r/Marxism and r/IWW from our analysis due to the small number of posts and vocabulary of these communities (See Figure 1). We also exclude r/alltheleft due to lack of literature regarding this community. In the end, we find seven topics that tankies are misaligned with the at least one of r/communism, r/socialism, r/DemocraticSocialism, or r/Anarchism: 1) acceptance of CCP narratives, 2) Stalinist leaning, 3) acceptance of the Russian narrative in Ukraine, 4) anti-Zionist leaning, 5) pejorative terms to ideologies, 6) leaning towards state-sponsored media, and 7) US politics.

Below, we describe each of these in detail. In addition, just because two communities have misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms does not necessarily explain what those misalignments and homomorphisms mean, which is central to our goal of understanding tankies in relation to the far-left. To address this, we performed a small-scale qualitative analysis (see Appendix C.1) with a sample of posts containing misaligned words that inform our interpretations. We also

performed a quantitative validation experiment (see Appendix C.2 for details) that further support our interpretations.

Acceptance of CCP Narratives (Magenta). Previously, we saw that the most popular topic tankies talk about is about the Uyghur Genocide and their most popular named entity is China. While it is possible that tankies may support the narrative of the CCP due to China being an AES country, as well as there being stories of r/GenZedong users attacking Uyghurs and promoting violence against them in the press [27], our previous analysis does not provide sufficient evidence to support this conclusion.

The first indication this is true from our misaligmment analysis is tankies’ use of the Chinese government’s preferred nomenclature of Communist Party of China (CPC) [22, 73, 93] instead of the more commonly used western term CCP. Additional indication along these lines is how tankies are misaligned with respect to Uyghurs. There is substantial evidence that China detains Uyghur Muslims and sends them to so-called “political re-education camps,” which are rife with human rights abuses [61, 96, 134] up to and including evidence of genocide [53, 124]. This misalignment is demonstrated through boarding schools & Uyghurs (i.e., that the Uyghur detention camps are merely typical schools), internment camps & camps, and reeducation camps & camps misalignment and conceptually homomorphic pairs. Finally, our analysis reveals a marked discrepancy in the discourse of tankies when it comes to the classification of individuals engaging in acts of civil disobedience. This disjuncture is further complicated by the historical precedent of the CCP’s characterization of peaceful protesters as “rioters” [38], which may serve as an indication of tankies’ alignment with the CCP’s narrative. As we check the top 10 most similar words by cosine similarity to “rioters” in the embedding of tankies, we find Hong Kong and hk words. We also find a Tiananmen Square & riots misalignment pair.

Stalinist Leaning (Lime). Tankies, as defined, have a tendency towards Stalinism (see Section 2). However, according to the definition provided by the subreddit r/InformedTankie, they primarily identify as Marxist-Leninists. So far, our previous analysis shows that tankies tend to focus more on topics related to Stalin and mention Stalin more frequently than Lenin in comparison to other far-left communities. Here, we identify several misaligning and conceptually homomorphic pairs that suggest a greater level of support for Stalinism among tankies. For example, we see misalignment in de-Stalinization & Khrushchev, destalinization & Khrushchev, Khrushchev & Stalin, and destalinization & Gorbachev pairs. Nikita Khruschev was General Secretary of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) after Stalin and is known for his de-Stalinization efforts [40, 66]. On the other hand, Mikhail Gorbachev is considered a successor of Khruschev’s de-Stalinization efforts [66]. For r/Anarchism, de-Stalinization & USSR is a conceptually homomorphic pair, which is meaningful when we consider the history of Anarchists in Soviet Gulag Camps [29, 84].

We also find trot & Trotskyists, trots & Trotskyists, trots & tankies, and Trotskyists & Stalinists misalignment pairs. Interestingly, leading additional credence to tankies’ Stalinist leaning, “trot” is a pejorative term used for Trotskyists, which was originally used by USSR-supporting elements during Stalin’s reign [3, 120].

Acceptence of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine (Cyan). The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions. We find that tankies are more accepting of the chosen nomenclature from the self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine’s Donbass region, Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which were explicitly recognized by the Russian government and used as casus belli for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine [129]. This pattern is not unusual among the far-left; a previous study [49] found that over 22% of comments on r/socialism between January 1, 2022, and March 15, 2022, were associated with topics presented by Russian state media, with more than 100 comments explicitly discussing Ukrainian Neo-Nazis. For r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism, we see this leaning from LPR & Donbass, DPR & Donbass, LPR & Donetsk, and LPR & Donetsk misalignment pairs. We find that LPR and DPR are not in the vocabulary of r/DemocraticSocialism (and conceptually homomorphic pairs regarding LPR and DPR were off-topic). This might be because the focus of r/DemocraticSocialism is more on US politics than AES and Russia – Ukraine war (see Figure 9). However, we see anti-Ukraine leaning of tankies from Zelensky & Trump conceptually homomorphic pair between tankies and r/DemocraticSocialism.

Anti-Zionist Leaning (Green). USSR had anti-Zionism efforts since its establishment [112], and today’s far-left anti-Zionism is showing similarity with USSR’s anti-Zionist campaigns [123]. We can see tankies have more leaning towards anti-Zionism from Zionist & Israeli, Zionists & Jews, Zionist & Israel, Zionism & Israel, and isntreal & Israel pairs. 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 [115]. It also ignores the fact that not all Jews or Israelis support the Zionist movement and the state of Israel [71, 115]. 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.

Pejorative Terms to Ideologies (Gray). We find tankies tend to refer to other ideologies with pejoratives. E.g., anarkiddies, anarchildrem, and anarkids instead of anarchists, succdems, succ dems, and succs instead of socdems, and westoids and libshits when referring to liberals. We also find ultras & tankies and radlibs & tankies pairs. Considering tankies is a pejorative term used by other ideologies, this finding means that tankies use ultras and radlibs in a pejorative way, similar to the Democrats v. Republicans example.

Leaning Towards State-Sponsored Media (Orange). We find RT & NYT and CGTN & CNN pairs between tankies and r/DemocraticSocialism. CGTN and RT are media organizations that receive direct support from their respective governments; CGTN is controlled by the Chinese government, while RT receives funding and backing from the Russian government [37, 85]. A previous study [48]

that involves RT and CGTN found that Russian and Chinese news outlets frequently employs “conflict” or “crisis” to refer Russian invasion of Ukraine, while Western news outlets typically use “war” and “invasion.” As we find later in Section 5.5, tankies have the highest proportion of sharing new outlets from China and Russia, and have the least proportion for news outlets from western democracies.

US Politics (No Highlight). We find that tankies frequently discuss Joe Biden, displaying a similar focus as r/DemocraticSocialism users have on Donald Trump. This tendency can be observed through the usage of phrases like “Bidens & Trumps” and “Sleepy Joe & Biden.” Additionally, the anti-democratic leaning of tankies is evident from their discussions on topics such as “popularity contest & elections.”

Takeaways. Analyzing the level of the usage of words between tankies and r/communism, r/socialism, r/DemocraticSocialism, and r/Anarchism allowed us to quantify and expand the literature on the attributes of tankies. We find that tankies are more accepting of CCP narratives and lean more towards Stalinism compared to these subreddits. They are also more likely to accept Russia’s narrative on Ukraine and show a stronger inclination towards Anti-Zionism. In addition to these ideological preferences, tankies tend to use pejorative terms when discussing ideologies and have a higher preference for state-sponsored media, particularly when compared to users in the r/DemocraticSocialism subreddit. Furthermore, tankies demonstrate less support for Joe Biden than those in the r/DemocraticSocialism community.

By understanding these distinct tendencies, our findings contribute to the existing literature on tankies and offer a deeper understanding of their communication styles and ideological leanings within online communities.