Mar 25, 2025
The Tankie Network: How Far-Left Extremists Evolve in Online Spaces
by DeplatformMarch 26th, 2025
Too Long; Didn't Read
This study investigates "tankie" communities on Reddit, analyzing over 1.3M posts to understand their ideology, discourse patterns, and network connections. Findings reveal their distinct vocabulary, higher toxicity levels, and migration to decentralized platforms post-deplatforming.‘a network diagram with nodes and connecting lines only’ Image created by HackerNoon AI Image Generator
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
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
5 Content Analysis and 5.1 What do tankies talk about?
5.2 Who are tankies talking about?
6 Discussion & Conclusion and 6.1 Limitations
6.2 Implications & future work, and References
A DATA
B NAMED ENTITIES
Table 9 presents the top 20 named entities, their frequency, and the percentage of posts they appear in within far-left subreddits other than tankie subreddits.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
L O A D I N G
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