From Marxist Forums to Chinese State Media: The Digital Ecosystem of Tankies

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

D DOMAIN ANALYSIS

We examine the differences in the popularity of domains between tankies and their similar ideologies in this section. This analysis will also help us to understand if there are any platforms specifically used by tankies. We first look for the popular domains shared by tankies to have a better understanding of the further results in this section.

Popular Domains Shared By Tankies. We detect 146,078 URLs from 7,049 different domains (including suffixes) tankies share. Table 11 shows top 20 domains shared by tankies after removing top 1,000 globally most visited domains by Majestic [74]. From the table, we see online Marxist/Marxist-Leninist hubs (marxist.org and workers.today), American left-wing alternative news sources (thegrayzone.com, peoplesworld.org, and foreignpolicy.com), and the web page of the Communist Party USA (cpusa.org), a Venezuelan alternative news source (telesurenglish.net), a British far-left alternative news site (newworker.org), a Reddit-like Marxist-Leninist platform (lemmygrad.ml), Chinese news outlets (cgtn.com and globaltimes.cn), and Chinese far-left platforms (redsails.org and qiaocollective.com).

Representative Domains of Tankies Based On Sharing Amount. To understand how representative (regarding the sharing amount of each domain) these domains are for tankies compared to other far-left communities, we take the advantage of Tf-Idf algorithm by approaching the domains as words. In a nutshell, Tf-Idf statistically measures the importance of a word for a document by normalizing the term frequencies of each word by their inverse document frequencies, which helps us to regard the most frequent words in the entire collection of documents similar to words that occur with low frequency [89]. So, when we create a list of domains by putting them into this list by the number of times they appeared for each community in the far-left, we can eliminate the commonly and frequently shared domains, which leaves us the sharing amount-wise more significantly shared domains for each community.

Table 12 and Table 13 present the top 10 domains ranked by their Tf-Idf scores for tankies and other far-left communities. Our analysis of the most representative domains shared by tankies yields several intriguing insights. Notably, we observe that newworker.org is the most representative domain for tankies in terms of sharing volume. Furthermore, lemmygrad.ml ranks as the third most representative domain in terms of sharing volume among tankies, which may suggest that this platform functions as an alternative social media platform, predominantly utilized by tankies, in lieu of Reddit.

We see two Chinese news outlets (globaltimes.cn and cgtn.com) and a web page of a podcast related to China’s engagement in Africa (chinaafricaproject.com), also a Sri Lankan news outlet (sundaytimes.lk). Additionally, we see trotskyistplatform.com on r/communism’s representative domains, which supports our findings based on the difference in the level of leaning toward Stalinism between tankies and this community.