Tracking the Rise of Tankies 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

4.3 User Migrations Over Time

Using the approach outlined by Ribeiro et al. [103], which tracks the movement of users across different Manosphere subreddits, we measure the extent of migration from a given source community to a destination community via two metrics:

Migration Relative to Destination (MRD), which measures the degree to which migrations into a destination community can be attributed to a given source community:

Migration Relative to Source (MRS), which measures the degree to which migrations from a source community can be attributed to a given destination community:

In this analysis, we examine two distinct time periods: July 2019 (when r/GenZedong was founded) to June 2020 and July 2020 (when the tankies community overtook r/communism in terms of MAU) to March 2022. MRDs and MRSs from other far-left communities to tankies are presented in Figure 4.

During the first month after r/GenZedong was founded, 58.4% of the tankies user-base came from other far-left communities. On average, 34.3% of tankies MAU came from other far-left communities during the first period. However, during the second period, there was a clear decrease in migrations from other far-left communities to tankies, with a mean MRD of 17.3%. The highest migrations to tankies come from r/communism and r/socialism for most of the months in our dataset. During the first period, the mean MRDs from these communities to tankies are 15.8%. The second period also saw a decrease in MRDs from these communities, with mean MRDs of 5.7% and 8.4% respectively.

We find strong negative correlations between the monthly user counts of tankies and MRDs to tankies from r/DemocraticSocialism (𝜌 = −0.71) and r/Anarchism (𝜌 = −0.71). We also find moderate negative correlations for r/Marxism (𝜌 = −0.69), r/communism (𝜌 = −0.68), r/socialism (𝜌 = −0.64), and r/IWW (𝜌 = −0.60). In contrast, we find a moderate positive correlation for r/alltheleft (𝜌 = 0.49). We do not observe any trend for this community’s MRDs to tankies, and we find decreasing trends for MRDs from other far-left communities to tankies when applying the Mann-Kendall test.

For the MRSs of other far-left communities to tankies, a different pattern emerges. In the second time period, we find that the MRSs to tankies from these communities are higher. Instead of r/socialism, we find r/Marxism and r/communism have the highest MRSs to tankies for most of the months in our dataset’s timeline. The mean MRSs for r/communism and r/Marxism are 6.4% and 7.5% in the first period, but they increase to 16% and 13.3% in the second period. This means that over 1 in 10 users from r/communism and r/Marxism continuously migrated to tankies during this period. This trend is also seen for r/alltheleft, except for three months. Our findings show that r/DemocraticSocialism and r/Anarchism have the lowest migrations to tankies, with mean migrations of 1% and 1.5% in the first period, and 2.4% and 2.6% in the second period, respectively.

In contrast to MRDs, we find positive strong correlations between the monthly user counts of tankies and MRSs from other far-left communities. r/socialism (𝜌 = 0.93), r/alltheleft (𝜌 = 0.91), r/DemocraticSocialism (𝜌 = 0.89), and r/IWW (𝜌 = 0.72) have strong correlations, while r/communism (𝜌 = 0.68), r/Anarchism (𝜌 = 0.62), and r/Marxism (𝜌 = 0.50) have moderate positive

correlations. We also find increasing trends for MRSs from each far-left community to tankies, except for r/Anarchism.

We find all correlations are significant, with 𝑝 < 0.01 after adjustment for multiple testing using the Benjamini-Hochberg method [17].

Takeaways. Overall, we find that the user-base of tankies is definitively positioned on the periphery of far-left ideologies. When we examine the migratory patterns between tankies and other far-left communities, we find that the popularity of tankies increased among other far-left communities (except r/Anarchism), even though their proportional contribution to the user base of tankies decreased over time. This suggests that the initial tankies community started with a relatively small number of members from established far-left communities, and then rapidly siphoned off members from these other far-left communities once it exceeded the user base of r/communism.