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
Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “actually existing socialist countries,” e.g., CCP run China, the USSR, former soviet countries, and North Korea. We collect 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankies subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues in comparison to other far-left communities. Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an organized response to deplatforming events.
1 INTRODUCTION
The use of social media by extremists is well documented in the press [4, 23, 108] and has been a heavy focus of the research community [7, 46, 75]. However, almost all recent work has studied rightwing extremists. This concentration can be attributed to several factors. The growing popularity of research on populism, as a result of the increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders globally [106], has led to a greater abundance of identifiable right-wing extremists online and their substantial impact on society. At the same time, there has been a steady rise in political rhetoric characterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists, scapegoating the far-left for violent activities (e.g., claiming Antifa orchestrated the January 6th Insurrection [15], accusing far-left extremists of planning and organizing violence during protests after George Floyd’s death [31], and blaming left-wing extremists for setting forest fires in Oregon [51])
While most of this rhetoric is easily dismissed as absurd (e.g., President Joe Biden does not fit any definition of far-left that we have found in the literature), many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well. For example, spreading mis- and disinformation from unreputable or overtly biased sources [122]. Despite the impact of right-wing online extremists, political rhetoric, and a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists, there are essentially no studies of the far-left on social media, let alone far-left extremists.
In this paper, we fill this gap by performing the first large-scale, data-driven measurements of the far-left on social media. We focus primarily on a large left-wing community known as tankies. Historically, tankies were supporters of hardline Soviet actions [43]; more Stalinist than Leninist. The name originates from Soviets using tanks to put down rebellions in eastern Europe [34, 50, 94, 100, 105, 107]. More recently, tankies have grown to support the actions of the CCP in China, a currently operational actually existing socialist (AES) country. Notably, their support can extend beyond just AES countries, often siding with or excusing anti-NATO, non-socialist, autocratic regimes, including Putin-controlled Russia’s actions [24, 35]. Regardless of their historical tactics, tankies have recently shown behavior similar to the right-wing extremists (e.g., denying the Uyghur genocide [104]).
Informed by the scant literature that exists on tankies, we first construct a set of tankie subreddits. We then measure the over 1M posts from 50K authors in our dataset across a variety of axes, giving us a unique view of how tankies are positioned within the larger left-wing community. We perform a set of quantitative analyses that reveal the relationship between tankies, other far-left communities, leftists, feminists, and capitalists. By constructing a graph where nodes are subreddits and an edge exists from one subreddit to another if the first subreddit links to the second in its sidebar, we identify 6 tankie subreddits and examined their prominence and connectivity within a reference network of over 21 K subreddits. We then compare the user overlap between our identified set of ideological subreddits. We also look at how tankies compare to the rest of the far-left with respect to their vocabulary, the topics they discuss, who they discuss, and the toxicity of their discussions. Finally, we measure user migrations between left-wing communities as well as tankies’ response to a deplatforming event.
Contributions. In summary, this paper makes several contributions. First, we provide the first large-scale measurements of the far-left on Reddit. To the best of our knowledge, this work also represents the largest scale study of the online far-left to date. Next, we identify and characterize the tankie community on Reddit. To the best of our knowledge, this paper provides the first such characterization of tankies in the literature across a multitude of disciplines. When looking at tankies’ positioning within our network of ideological subreddits, we find they are indeed at the periphery of the far-left, and should thus be considered left-wing extremists. We further show that tankies differ from the rest of the far-left in several striking ways. E.g., tankies show consistent vocabulary misalignments when compared to other far-left communities, exhibit more toxicity than other far-left communities, and share more links from revisionist news. We also show that user migration patterns from other far-left communities to tankies coincided with tankies becoming the most popular far-left community on Reddit prior to being banned. Finally, we show that tankies’ response to Reddit deplatforming them was similar to that of right-wing extremists: completely migrating to a new platform and relatively increasing their use of toxic language.
