A Data-driven Understanding of Left-Wing Extremists on Social Media: Community Growth

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

4.2 Community Growth

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?