How Tankies Distort Online Political Narratives

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

C MISALIGNMENT ANALYSIS

As mentioned in Section 5.3, we perform a small-scale qualitative analysis utilizing a sample of posts (20 from each community for each interpretation) containing misaligned/conceptually homomorphic word pairs to inform our interpretations. To further enhance the validity of our conclusions, we also implement a quantitative validation experiment using the SEVERE_TOXICITY

model provided by Perspective API. These experiments aimed to validate our interpretation of the misalignment of word pairs related to: 1) acceptance of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives, 2) Stalinist leaning, 3) acceptance of Russian narratives in Ukraine, and 4) anti-Zionist leaning.

In our analyses, we group the misaligning/conceptually homomorphic word pairs of each community. As an example, to validate our findings on the anti-Zionist leanings of tankies, we analyze the posts containing “Zionist,” “isntreal,” “Zionists,” and “Zionism” keywords for the tankies community, as well as the corresponding misaligning words for the other communities we analyze. Nonetheless, in cases where keywords possess polarized or disparate meanings, we partition them for specific interpretations within certain communities (e.g., when validating the Stalinist leaning of tankies, we do not put “Khrushchev” and “Stalin” in the same keyword list). Categories of our interpretations with the keywords used for each community can be seen from Table 10.

We do not validate our findings for pejorative terms to ideologies as we find tankies is the most toxic community among the communities we analyze (See Section 5.4). Similarly, we do not validate findings related to tankies’ leaning on state-sponsored media as our results reveal that tankies has the highest proportion of users sharing news outlets from “Revisionist World Powers,” which are generally known to be state-sponsored (See Section 5.5). We also do not perform further analysis regarding US politics, as the misalignment between tankies and r/DemocraticSocialism is the only substantial observation in our data.

C.1 Qualitative Validation

Our analysis on the sampled posts (20 for each community and interpretation) suggests that tankies predominantly supports CCP, especially compared to the other far-left communities. We find many posts that show support for CCP and blames west for conducting anti-CCP propaganda – e.g.:

The media is compelled to target the CPC, which often leads to its misrepresentation.

During our analysis, we encounter posts that denies the Uyghur Genocide for each community with varying frequencies, while tankies primarily deny the occurrence of the genocide – e.g.:

To me, boarding schools serve as schools for potential terrorists, and China’s approach seems more humane than the US’s.

We also confirm that tankies mostly use “rioters” to define Hong Kong/Tiananmen Square protesters – e.g.:

HK rioters are frikkin psychos.

and,

I won’t dispute the Tiananmen Square massacre; rest in peace soldiers who died addressing the CIA-fueled unrest.

We find tankies talk negatively about Trotskyists and de-Stalinization –e.g.:

Khrushchev was a big time idiot when it came to de-Stalinization.

Nevertheless, we observe mixed posts concerning Khrushchev. This could be attributed to the fact that, although tankies predominantly oppose de-Stalinization and criticize Khrushchev on this basis, they also exhibit sympathy for him as a former leader of the USSR who presided over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. We also find r/DemocraticSocialism use “tankie” as a pejorative term and show opposition to this community

In our sample, we find numerous posts from tankies expressing support for the Russian invasion of Donbass – e.g.:

Safeguarding DPR and LPR from Nazis financed by NATO is a positive action.

In our analysis of the sampled posts from the other communities, we observe a mixture of content. Notably, r/communism and r/socialism exhibit a higher frequency of posts expressing support for Russia compared to r/Anarchism. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the majority of the sampled posts from tankies mentioning Zelensky express opposition to him – e.g.:

Zelensky should have an azov symbol on his head lmao.

We also see the sampled posts of tankies are predominantly anti-Zionist – e.g.:

Zionism equates to Fascism.

and

That’s Isntreal and nah, we don’t endorse Israel.

We observe numerous posts expressing opposition to Israel or Israeli policies across other communities. However, r/DemocraticSocialism exhibits the lowest frequency of such posts compared to the other communities.

C.2 Quantative Validation

To quantitatively validate our interpretations, we first leverage the SEVERE_TOXICITY model of the Perspective API. We then compare the high toxicity levels of various misaligning keywords for each interpretation. Table 10 shows the basic statistics and proprotions of high SEVERE_TOXICITY scores for the keywords indicative of misalignment.

Acceptance of CCP Narrative. Our analysis reveals that tankies exhibit the lowest proportion of high SEVERE_TOXICITY for posts containing the keyword “CPC” when compared to the posts of other communities containing the keyword “CCP.” Conversely, tankies display a higher proportion of high scores for the keywords related to Uyghur Genocide. Based on our sampled data, we infer that tankies tend to adopt a more toxic tone when denying the Uyghur Genocide, while other communities engage in less toxic discourse when discussing Uyghur-related topics. Furthermore, we observe that r/communism and r/socialism demonstrate a reduced fraction of high toxicity when addressing “camps,” which are mostly related to concentration camps established the by the CCP or Nazis. Finally, we find tankies have higher proportion of high scores when mentioning “rioters” (which are possibly towards Hong Kong protesters) compared to other communities’ posts mentioning “protesters/protestors.”

We find tankies have the second highest proportion of high SEVERE_TOXICITY scores for their posts containing Tiananmen Square compared to the other communities posts contain “riots.”

Stalinist Leaning. We find that tankies display the highest proportion of high SEVERE_TOXICITY scores for posts featuring anti-Stalinist or de-Stalinization-related keywords when compared to r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism. Furthermore, we observe more comparable proportions when comparing the keywords used by tankies with the Stalinist or pro-USSR keywords present in r/socialism and r/Anarchism. In addition, we identify a similar proportion of high scores in r/DemocraticSocialism’s usage of tankies, further corroborating the negative sentiment of tankies towards anti-Stalinism and de-Stalinization.

Acceptance of Russian Narrative on Ukraine. We find tankies exhibit the second highest proportion of high SEVERE_TOXICITY scores for posts with keywords related to Ukraine’s Donbass region. Nevertheless, less than 1% of tankie posts display high scores, which may be attributed to their support for the self-proclaimed republics in Donbass. Moreover, tankies have more than four times higher proportion of high scores for posts containing “Zelensky” compared to r/DemocraticSocialism’s posts containing “Trump.” This finding serves as an additional indicator of tankies’ alignment with the Russian narrative.

Anti-Zionist Leaning. Our analysis reveals that over 5% of tankie posts containing Zionismrelated keywords exhibit high SEVERE_TOXICITY scores, which is the highest proportion compared to other communities. Intriguingly, tankies display an even greater proportion of elevated scores for posts featuring Zionism-related keywords than for their own usage of the term “isntreal.”