The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.
It’s quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.
I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I’ll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as “positivist reductionism” is a “hard science guy” who thinks he[1] doesn’t have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because “numbers will tell me everything I need to know”.
[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it’s usually a guy.
I don’t know if humanities could have salvaged some of this paper. They just make so many assumptions out of thin air and expect the reader to just go along with them, like this here:
The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions.
This is a specific claim, that in other words says “tankies support the Soviet Union, and as such they support the Russian Federation”. But no source accompanies this claim, no definitions either, and ultimately the next sentence contradicts this claim – they started from the conclusion, the starting point being them wanting to prove “Acceptence [sic] of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine” (yes the typo was originally there).
But the two are two entirely different claims, it does not logically follow that support for the USSR means support of Russia in the war. They just gloss over that though and start talking about their “word pairs” as if that proved anything lol
This is divination for computer scientists.
I’ve never written a scientific paper before but I would be ashamed to actually put this out for my peers to review.
