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 did an in-depth ‘debunk’ of this study.
I want to highlight the most egregious part of it, to me at least. Here’s an excerpt from my article:
As we find later in Section 5.4, tankies have the most proportion of posts with high identity attack against Jews in the far-left community.
??? Let’s pull up that section quickly:
The Perspective API [92] is a widely used [9, 12, 26] tool for measuring toxicity. Although it has limitations, e.g., there are issues of bias and questions of performance when encountering conversation patterns that it was not trained on, at scale it provides a decent measure for comparison between online communities.
They used an API tool to analyze comments on the tankie subreddits. They specifically mention that it has limitations if it wasn’t trained on certain conversation patterns. The Perspective website doesn’t mention it being trained on Reddit comments or comments in leftist communities. This is junk science, of course.
Finally, we observe that tankies frequently target Muslims and Jews in their posts.
I’m not about to dig too deep into the way this API determines what constitutes an Identity Attack, since this study doesn’t even attempt to elaborate on it, but I’m going to assume that if it detects ‘hateful words’ in the same comment as a ‘named entity’ like Jew or Muslim, it just assumes the comment is attacking that entity.
Here’s the problem. A comment like this:
“Zionists are pieces of shit for assuming all Jews support Israel”
or this:
“Implying that the US gives a fuck about Muslims when they criticize China is delusional”
would likely be considered by this bot to be an attack against Jews or Muslims. Curiously, this report doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence of these attacks on Jews or Muslims. But, in the ‘C.1 Qualitative Validation’ section, they do give some examples of the toxic comments that this bot identified. Not a single one is specifically about Jews or Muslims.
Here’s two examples:
To me, boarding schools serve as schools for potential terrorists, and China’s approach seems more humane than the US’s
and
Zionism equates to Fascism.
Neither comment is an Identity Attack against Muslims or Jews. The first is talking specifically about the small portion of Uyghurs that China has identified as being radicalized, not all Muslims. The second is about Zionism, which as this study pointed out, does not mean all Jews. Neither one contains the word ‘Jew’, or ‘Muslim’, anyway.
Hmm, I wonder why they omitted that. Because the truth doesn’t fit the ‘tankie bad’ narrative they are pushing? This is research misconduct, pure and simple, and this singular example of evidentiary omission should cause any non-tankies reading this study to dismiss it in its entirety. But of course, it won’t.
i’m thinking about their claim that “the predominant topic of discussion” among tankies is the uyghur “genocide.” like bro there’s 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.
Tbh, I see more posts on here about the war in Ukraine than Xinjiang lately. We only ever talked about it because liberals were obsessed with creating a genocide narrative. Now that their short attention spans have moved on to the next act of dehumanization, why would we bother talking about something we know isn’t real? The only reason we ever have to discuss half the mainstream topics about China is to deconstruct the myths around them.
Not that these “researchers” would know that.
I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:
A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.
Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.
LESGOOOO #LEMMYGRADSWEEP ✊✊✊🫡🫡🫡
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i am now a master tankie 🫡🫡🫡
Why do they think we think all Jews are Zionists?
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.
