Mapping Left-Wing Extremism on Reddit | 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

3 DATA

Left-wing extremism is an understudied area in comparison to right-wing extremism. One of the reasons for this is that identifying online communities associated with left-wing extremist groups is challenging in and of itself. To address this, our first step is to identify a group of subreddits that are part of the overall tankie community, which represents a segment of the broader left-wing extremist landscape. Then, to explore how tankies are positioned within the overall political discourse on Reddit, we collect a set of subreddits representing more mainstream ideologies.

Reddit. Reddit is one of the world’s largest social media platforms, with over 1.5 billion monthly visits as of February 2022 [121]. Reddit is made up of over 130,000 communities called “subreddits,” which are moderated by volunteer users and have their own rules. Users can participate in subreddits by submitting links, commenting, and voting on submissions and comments. Reddit also allows subreddits to display a banner, which is usually located near the list of submissions. Banners are often used to communicate the theme, purpose, rules, etc. of the subreddit. Reddit’s diverse set of political subreddits offer the opportunity to study and position tankies within the broader political spectrum. Additionally, because of its user-created and moderated communities, Reddit has been the subject of various studies on extremist online communities and the moderation actions taken against them [9, 25, 56, 75, 103], making it an ideal platform to understand the tankie community.

3.1 Identifying Tankie Subreddits

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale data-driven study to examine tankies. While previous research [46, 126] does mention tankie subreddits r/tankie and r/tankies, they both have relatively few subscribers (42 and 213 at the time of this writing, respectively). We therefore start from scratch and create our own set of tankie subreddits.

We begin by searching for the terms “tankie” and “tankies” on Reddit, from which we discovered r/InformedTankie, which has 13.8K members. Via a qualitative analysis, it is quite clear that r/InformedTankie serves as a sort of hub for tankie users, with resources and information related to the tankie ideology. For example, r/InformedTankie’s banner provides a definition of tankies that aligns with Petterson’s description (Section 2):

For those who aren’t aware of what “tankie” means, its context has culturally changed in the online left from meaning people who support the USSR sending tanks into Hungary to crush the fascist coup, to being an umbrella term for communists in general, especially Marxist-Leninists who defend and/or support the Actually Existing Socialist (AES) countries.

The banner also includes a list of eight “Allied Subreddits.” Via manual inspection, we find that four of them (r/Genzedong, r/sendinthetanks, r/asktankies, and r/BunkerTube) express support for so called AES countries as well as describing themselves as communist (specifically, “Marxist” or “Marxist-Leninist”) in their banners. The remaining four subreddits are related to the more general Marxist/Marxist-Leninist perspective rather than being specifically tankie related.

To discover additional tankie communities, we take a snowball sampling strategy. Starting from r/InformedTankie, we recursively look for additional subreddits linked to in banners that fit with Petterson’s description as well as the definition from r/InformedTankie. The search stops when we no longer encounter any additional tankie subreddits within the next three hops. This network includes one additional tankie subreddit, r/GenZhou.

Next, we build a simple crawler that recursively collects the names of any subreddits listed in the banners of the subreddits we have so far collected, stopping when we discover no new subreddits. This results in a “reference network” of 21,161 subreddits.

Because our manual seeding might have missed other tankie subreddits, we make one additional attempt to identify new ones. Since tankies position themselves within the larger ideology of communism, we create a subgraph of our reference network composed of the shortest paths between our six tankie subreddits and r/communism, pinpointing the most directly connected subreddits. The resulting subgraph has 18 nodes (i.e., subreddits) and 19 edges, but does not contain any additional tankie subreddits.

In the end, our reference network contains 21,161 nodes and 114,962 edges, where an edge is created if a subreddit includes a link to another subreddit in its banner. Table 1 presents the total number of posts (submissions + comments), total number of authors, and the dates of the earliest and the latest posts for our six tankie subreddits.

To get a better understanding of the prominence and connectivity of the tankies subreddits in our reference network, we compute three different network measures, in-degree, out-degree, and PageRank. This way, we aim to get a better insight into the online behavior and interactions of tankies:

• In-Degree: Number of edges pointing to a node from other nodes.

• Out-Degree: Number of edges a node pointing to other nodes.

• PageRank: Quantifies the structural importance of a node by ranking it based on the relative importance of its inbound edges.

We also provide additional information about the subreddits linking to the tankie subreddits in our reference network in Tables 7 and 8 in the Appendix.

r/GenZedong is the most popular tankie subreddit we find, with nearly 1.3M posts created by 50K authors. With a first post date in July 2019, it is also the oldest tankie subreddit we discover. r/GenZedong itself does not link to any subreddit, and thus has zero out-degree in our reference network graph. On the other hand, it has a 0.00006 PageRank score, making it the second-highest ranked tankie subreddit. As additional evidence that tankies’ are indeed supporters of AES countries like China, we note that a Taiwanese nationalist subreddit links to r/GenZedong, describing its members as “Communist Bandits.” Due to spreading misinformation, r/GenZedong was quarantined by Reddit on March 23, 2022 [99]. A Previous study [86] on 2021 Cuban Protests found that r/GenZedong supports Cuban regime while condemning those who oppose it.

r/sendinthetanks, with 42,813 posts from 5,603 authors, and an earliest post date of March 2020, is the second most popular tankie subreddit in our dataset. Besides leftist subreddits, we find r/Enough_VDS_Spam (a subreddit dedicated to defending Vaush, a libertarian socialist streamer [102]) links to this subreddit under the heading “Sources of Cringe.” This is an early indication of polarization between tankies and some far-left communities. Despite its popularity, r/sendinthetanks has the second lowest PageRank score of our tankie subreddits. One possible reason for this could be the content and focus of the subreddit. While other tankie subreddits may be more centered on promoting certain ideologies or agendas, 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.

r/InformedTankie, the third most popular tankie subreddit, has 29,242 posts from 3,697 authors dating back to March 2020. It is listed by r/Sino as a subreddit that can be crossposted from, likely indicating a pro-China bias among its members. Our findings show that r/InformedTankie has the highest in-degree and PageRank scores, as well as the second highest out-degree score of tankie subreddits, which supports our previous hypothesis that it serves as a hub for the tankie community.

r/GenZhou is the fourth most popular tankie subreddit, with 28,606 posts from 3,620 authors since December 2020. r/GenZhou refers not only to leftist subreddits, but also subreddits that are ideologically opposed to tankies (r/tankiejerk, r/askaconservative, r/centrist, and r/nato) as well as debate subreddits (r/answers and r/PoliticalDiscussion). One explanation might be that r/GenZhou could be pointing these communities to their user-base to call for support in certain discussions. We also find r/GenZhou referring to r/AskARussian, which might reflect a pro-Russian leaning. Reddit banned r/GenZhou on April 4, 2022 [98] for “creating or repurposing a sub to reconstitute or serve the same objective as a previously banned or quarantined subreddit” (i.e., ban evasion).

r/asktankies is the fifth most popular tankie subreddit with 6,678 posts from 937 authors since January 2021. It is a Q&A subreddit in which questions are answered by tankie users.

r/Bunkertube is the least popular tankie subreddit, with only 12 posts from 5 authors since November 2020. It has the lowest in-degree, out-degree, and PageRank scores among tankie subreddits.

3.2 Identifying Ideology Subreddits

To understand the positioning of tankies within the larger ideology spectrum, we initially need to pinpoint prominent ideological subreddits, specifically those situated to the left of center. To accomplish this, we employ a list [97]previously utilized for identifying ideologically slanted subreddits [113]. Subsequently, we carry out a comparative analysis between communities from this list that demonstrate closeness to tankies and the tankies themselves.

This list is composed of 43 subreddits representing a range of ideologies, from r/Conservative to r/Anarchism, and numerous subvariants, e.g., r/AnarchoPacifism. We manually examine the list, identifying one non-English subreddit (r/piratenpartei), which we remove, along with subreddits that no longer exist or have become private. Further manual examination reveals that r/Communist, r/Anarchist, and r/feminisms are not the largest subreddits for their respective ideologies; therefore, we incorporate the largest subreddits explicitly dedicated to them (r/communism, r/Anarchism, and r/Feminism).

3.3 Post Collection

We first collect all posts from the six tankie subreddits we identify earlier in this section using the Pushshift API [14]. As previously noted, on March 23, 2022 r/GenZedong was quarantined due to spreading misinformation. Thus, we restrict our dataset to posts made from July 15, 2019 (the

earliest post in one of our tankie subreddits) to March 23, 2022. Next, we collect the posts from the additional 41 ideology subreddits we identified over the same time period. In the end, we collect 22,481,036 posts (1,380,628 from tankies, 21,100,408 from other ideologies). Figure 1 plots the total number of posts for each subreddit in our dataset.