Identifying Ideology Subreddits and Post Collection

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

3.2 Identifying Ideology Subreddits

To understand the positioning of tankies within the larger ideology spectrum, we initially need to pinpoint prominent ideological subreddits, specifically those situated to the left of center. To accomplish this, we employ a list [97]previously utilized for identifying ideologically slanted subreddits [113]. Subsequently, we carry out a comparative analysis between communities from this list that demonstrate closeness to tankies and the tankies themselves.

This list is composed of 43 subreddits representing a range of ideologies, from r/Conservative to r/Anarchism, and numerous subvariants, e.g., r/AnarchoPacifism. We manually examine the list, identifying one non-English subreddit (r/piratenpartei), which we remove, along with subreddits that no longer exist or have become private. Further manual examination reveals that r/Communist, r/Anarchist, and r/feminisms are not the largest subreddits for their respective ideologies; therefore, we incorporate the largest subreddits explicitly dedicated to them (r/communism, r/Anarchism, and r/Feminism).

3.3 Post Collection

We first collect all posts from the six tankie subreddits we identify earlier in this section using the Pushshift API [14]. As previously noted, on March 23, 2022 r/GenZedong was quarantined due to spreading misinformation. Thus, we restrict our dataset to posts made from July 15, 2019 (the

earliest post in one of our tankie subreddits) to March 23, 2022. Next, we collect the posts from the additional 41 ideology subreddits we identified over the same time period. In the end, we collect 22,481,036 posts (1,380,628 from tankies, 21,100,408 from other ideologies). Figure 1 plots the total number of posts for each subreddit in our dataset.