Authors:
(1) UTKUCAN BALCI, Binghamton University, United States;
(2) MICHAEL SIRIVIANOS, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus;
(3) JEREMY BLACKBURN, Binghamton University, United States.
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
4 USER-BASE ANALYSIS
In this section, our objective is to comprehensively examine the prominence of tankies within the far-left ideology spectrum and their interactions with other far-left communities. We build a graph of subreddits based on the users that post in them, perform community detection to find clusters with similar user bases as tankie subreddits, and examine user migration patterns between tankies and other communities in the cluster.
Our first step is to detect communities of similar ideological subreddits. To do this, we follow a methodology similar to that of Squire [117]. First, we construct a graph where each node represents a subreddit and the edges between the nodes represent the number of users they have in common. These edges are weighted using Bonacich’s method [20], which assigns a weight to each membership affiliation based on its relative strength within the network. This method takes into account the fact that an individual’s membership in one group may be influenced by their membership in other groups, which helps us to reveal underlying structural patterns that might not be apparent in unprocessed overlap data.
Next, we apply the Louvain community detection algorithm [19] to identify clusters of subreddits within the network. The algorithm, in a nutshell, works by optimizing a modularity measure, which quantifies the degree to which the network is divided into distinct communities. It is widely used and validated for identifying communities or groups of nodes within a network, particularly in social networks [42, 60]. We expect that if our subreddits do indeed represent different political ideologies, the structure of this graph will naturally lead to empirical clusters that align with the theoretical literature. To check if these clusters can be further divided, we recursively run the Louvain method on the identified clusters, recalculating the edges for each subcluster. This allows us to examine the spectrum of ideologies represented in our dataset.
Fig. 2. Relationship between user base ideological subreddits. Far-Left subreddits are colored red (with non-tankies colored light red in 2b), Leftists are colored gray, Capitalists are colored green, and Feminists are colored blue. A stronger red hue indicates a higher similarity between the user-bases of two subreddits.
Results. Figure 2a plots the resulting graph, where nodes are colored according to the community they were placed in, and the graph is laid out in space such that subreddits that share fewer common authors after normalization are farther apart from each other [63]. We next describe the clusters in more detail.
Far-Left (Red Cluster). March [77] defines far-left political parties as those that see themselves further left than social democracy. Tankies are indeed clustered with subreddits representing wellknown far-left ideologies, e.g., r/communism, r/socialism, r/Anarchism, r/Marxism, and r/IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, a syndicalist labor union [28] representing nearly 9,000 workers across North America [62]). We also see r/alltheleft in this cluster, which has a similar extreme identity to the left similar to communist, socialist, and anarchist subreddits [78]. This cluster does not split into more clusters when we recursively apply the Louvain algorithm.
Other Ideologies. While the far-left communities were neatly formed in the first round of clustering, other ideologies ended up in a large cluster together. We thus apply the Louvain algorithm recursively until subclusters do not split more, as previously described. In the end, we find three coherent clusters that fit into ideologies that have been well covered in the theoretical literature:
• Feminists (Blue Cluster): This cluster includes feminist and feminist-leaning subreddits (r/feminism, r/feminisms, r/anarchafeminism, r/radicalfeminism, and r/egalitarianism).
• Leftists (Gray Cluster): This cluster includes left-leaning ideologies that are closer to moderate/center-left on the ideology spectrum (e.g., r/socialdemocracy, r/greenparty, r/progressive), as well as libertarian-left subreddits (r/libertariansocialism and r/libertarianleft) and some anarcho/anarchist-leaning communities (e.g., r/anarchopascifism, r/voluntarism, and r/republicanism).
• Capitalists (Green Cluster): This cluster includes liberal-leaning ideologies (e.g., r/liberal, r/democrats), anti-authoritarian capitalist ideologies (r/libertarian, r/anarchocapitalism), and conservative ideologies (e.g., r/conservative, r/republican) alongside r/capitalism.
When we look at how tankies and other ideology subreddits are layed out in Figure 2a, we see some meaningful positions. For example, 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, it makes sense that they are positioned close to each other. Additionally, even though one of the closest subreddits to r/conservatives is r/liberal, they are still relatively distant. Tankie subreddits are also positioned on the periphery of the far-left cluster, highlighting their extremeness.
To get a different perspective on the relatedness of different ideological communities, we plot a heatmap in Figure 2b showing the edge values for each pair of subreddits in our ideological graph. From this heatmap, we can see that the subreddits in the far-left and leftist clusters are relatively well-connected compared to those in the capitalist community. Additionally, we observe that tankie subreddits are clearly much better connected with each other than other subreddits in their corresponding community. This is strong evidence that tankies are a distinct community within the far-left. With this in mind, we now move on to further understand how tankies are positioned within the far-left.
Although technically speaking, tankies are quite an old community, their tangible influence or presence within the broader context has historically been quite limited. To understand how things have changed, we first examine the growth of the tankies community on Reddit compared to other far-left communities by plotting the monthly active user counts (MAU) for each far-left community in our dataset in Figure 3. Starting in July 2020, the tankies community saw a large influx of active users, doubling in about six months and growing larger than the user base of r/communism. As of April 2021, tankies had more active users than any other far-left subreddits. MAU for tankies doubles again between November 2021 and March 2022, reaching 11,872 active users. r/socialism has the second highest MAU of far-left subreddits after tankies (3,559), which is 30% of tankies for that month. We also see a decline in monthly active users in every far-left subreddit except tankies starting in February 2022, which is the month Russia invaded Ukraine [65].
To understand the significance of the tankies community’s growth, we run a Mann-Kendall Test [68, 76], a non-parametric test for analyzing monotonic trends in time series data, on our MAU time series. For 𝛼 = 0.01, we find tankies is the only community with a statistically significant increase in MAU (𝑧 > 0 and |𝑧| > 𝑧(1−𝛼/2), 𝑝 < 0.01). We also observe a strong positive correlation between tankies’ MAU and time ( 𝜌 = 0.97 and 𝑝 < 0.01) when applying Spearman’s Correlation, indicating that tankies’ user base has been steadily increasing over time. These results raise an important question: are these completely new users getting involved in far-left ideologies or is the user-base of existing far-left subreddits migrating to tankies over time?
