If i turned in something like this to my proff with those sorces, I would be down listed a grade minum. I cannot belive that passes as research.

It’s like Whack-A-mole with all those bozos.

Too late I have read it and tried to understand, all I got was confusion, annoyance, and a headache.

HUSH YOUR GOING TO BLOW OUR COVER!!!! how are we suposed to get the commies at hexbear to trust us if you blab right before they fedderate?

We got our own little shibboleth

Oh yeah, we use the cHinESe gOveRnMenT's PrEFeRrEd nOmeNClaTurE, so we're misaligned. What a joke. It'd be like calling the USA the AUS and insisting that everyone who gets it right has been manipulated by the US government. Sorry, the SU government.

More recently, tankies have grown to support the actions of the CCP in China, a currently operational actually existing socialist (AES) country.

Using "CCP" instead of "CPC" is a telling choice of terminology. One that they consistently use throughout the paper until they have to examine "tankie subreddits" specifically later, and find themselves needing to use the correct "CPC" version for misalignment analysis (Tables 4, 10), as well as:

The first indication this is true from our misaligmment analysis is tankies’ use of the Chinese government’s preferred nomenclature of Communist Party of China (CPC) [ 22, 73 , 93] instead of the more commonly used western term CCP.

Moving on...

Notably, their support can extend beyond just AES countries, often siding with or excusing anti-NATO, non-socialist, autocratic regimes, including Putin-controlled Russia’s actions [ 24 , 35].

I mean, at least the authors recognize that Russia is "non-socialist." And it is true that socialists of varying stripes are against NATO, not just "tankies."

Examining the sources:

• 24 is: "Roane Carey. 2022. Don’t Be a Tankie: How the Left Should Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. The Intercept (Mar 2022). https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-leftists-tankie/"
• 35 is: "Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła. 2022. Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine. Foreign Policy (Jul 2022). https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/"

These sources faithfully recount the fact that Marxist-Leninists ("tankies") are not uncritically accepting NATO's framing of the war. Using the Foreign Policy article as an example:

Meanwhile, many on the progressive left—including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the politicians they support, left-wing academics and essayists, and swaths of self-proclaimed online “anti-imperialists”—have tended to side with the aggressor, Russia (or at least not side with the victim, Ukraine) in one of the clearest examples of colonial aggression in recent memory. Their primary arguments mirror those of the right—NATO expansion and Russia’s legitimate security concerns as a trigger for the war as well as the misuse of funds that could be used to solve domestic problems—but they also express opposition to war full stop and, sometimes, espouse outright support for Russia, all wrapped in language of opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, often construed as “U.S. imperialism.”

There has always been a fringe minority of voices on the far left that have been pejoratively labeled “tankies.” Often self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, they have been apologists for the repressive actions of authoritarian communist governments, such as those of the Soviet Union or China. The insult was originally hurled by fellow leftists at the Western communists who cheered as the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest to repress a popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Today, the term is mostly tossed around in online circles, referring to supporters of repressive regimes and applying primarily to the opinions held by fringe journalists working for opaquely funded alternative news sources who praise dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The article stretches hard to say that horseshoe theory is real and its basis is a yearning for populism, but it is a decent read at least for getting inside the mind of someone who considers themselves not on either end of an extreme. If nothing else, it does support the authors' contention that "tankies" -- though of course, other socialists as well -- are anti-NATO. A contention that I don't think anyone here would object to.

Regardless of their historical tactics, tankies have recently shown behavior similar to the right-wing extremists (e.g., denying the Uyghur genocide [104]).

• 104 is (libgen link): "Sean R Roberts. 2020. The war on the Uyghurs. In The war on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press."

The "Uyghur genocide" narrative has been debunked ad naseum. Denying the "Uyghur genocide" is in no way comparable to denying actual genocide. But for the sake of completeness, user /u/ComradePubIvy has already taken a peek at the source:

Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR “managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs” he is known for his “… comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China …” and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,

And in the "NOTES" section of this book, here are the sources given for its preface:

1 Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff, ‘Xinjiang Authorities Sending Uyghurs to Work in China’s Factories, Despite Coronavirus Risks,’ Radio Free Asia (27 February 2020).

2 SCMP Reporters, ‘China Plans to Send Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang Re-Education Camps to Work in Other Parts of Country,’ South China Morning Post (2 May 2020).

3 Keegan Elmer, ‘China says it will ‘Normalise’ Xinjiang Camps as Beijing Continues Drive to Defend Policies in Mainly Muslim Region,’ South China Morning Post (9 December 2019).

4 Erkin, ‘Boarding Preschools For Uyghur Children “Clearly a Step Towards a Policy of Assimilation”: Expert,’ Radio Free Asia (6 May 2020).

5 Gulchehre Hoja, ‘Subsidies For Han Settlers “Engineering Demographics” in Uyghur-Majority Southern Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia (13 April 2020).

And here are the first ten sources for its introduction:

1 Emily Feng, ‘China Targets Muslim Uyghurs Studying Abroad,’ Financial Times (1 August 2017).

2 See Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (14 March 2017); Magha Rajagopalan, ‘This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,’ Buzzfeed News (17 October 2017).

3 Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (21 September 2017).

4 Nathan VanderKlippe, ‘Frontier Injustice: Inside China’s Campaign to “Re-educate” Uyghurs,’ The Globe and Mail (9 September 2017); HRW, ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’ (10 September 2017); Eset Sulaiman, ‘China Runs Region-wide Re-education Camps in Xinjiang for Uyghurs and Other Muslims,’ RFA (11 September 2017).

5 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘China’s Reeducation Camps are Beginning to Look Like Concentration Camps,’ Vox (24 October 2018).

6 See ‘Inside the Camps Where China Tries to Brainwash Muslims Until They Love the Party and Hate Their Own Culture,’ Associated Press (17 May 2018); David Stavrou, ‘A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on Inside,’ Haaretz (17 October 2019).

7 See Amie Ferris-Rotman, ‘Abortions, IUDs and Sexual Humiliation: Muslim Women who Fled China for Kazakhstan Recount Ordeals,’ Washington Post (5 October 2019); Eli Meixler, ‘“I Begged Them to Kill Me.” Uighur Woman Tells Congress of Torture in Chinese Internment Camps,’ TIME (30 November 2018); Ben Mauk, ‘Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State,’ The Believer (1 October 2019).

8 Shoret Hoshur ‘Nearly Half of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Hotan Targetted for Re-education Camps,’ RFA (9 October 2017).

9 Sean R. Roberts, ‘Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century,’ Fair Observer (17 December 2018).

10 See Zenz and Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State.’

RFA, SCMP, Zenz, et. al. Not exactly reliable sources.

It's a grift on supposed support for "data-driven" analyses. It's just a specultive opinion piece. Its data handling and analysis is anything but academic.

Are you saying a data science major lets me write a paper that calls theirs BS because the p-value is low?

Since you are reading it, what is the ranking in the screenshot based on?

So far, on the arxiv page, no data or source code have been provided alongside the paper. I'd expect jupyter journals, or something like that at least, for reproducibility. Perhaps they will be added later or they are provided in a URL within the paper that I have not yet read.

In any case, the screenshot is of Table 11, and it is found in Appendix 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).

Describing foreignpolicy.com as left-wing is an example of miscategorization by the authors, as is calling redsails.org a "Chinese far-left platform." Neither of these are accurate statements, and they undercut trust that the authors are correctly and thoroughly labeling and interpreting their data. Between this and other glaring oversights in Table 12 -- which purports that domains like "redditsave.com," "ko-fi.com," "twimg.com," and "archive.is" are "representative domains of tankies" specifically and supposedly not heavily found in other similar far-left communities (as per the authors' description of the Tf-Idf algorithm and their motivation for its use) -- there is a compelling case that the authors (1) do not themselves possess a sufficient level of understanding of left-wing ideology -- much less Marxist-Leninist ideology -- to label it accurately, and (2) may have been sloppy with their data analysis (though this can't be definitively known without access to the underlying datasets and analytics source code).

• 74 is: "Majestic. 2022. Majestic. https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million"

Majestic is described on the cited URL as: "The million domains we find with the most referring subnets." Basically, of the 7,049 different domains contained in the 146,078 URLs the authors found in their crawl, remove any that are found in the top 1,000 domains as defined by Majestic. Domains like google.com, facebook.com, reddit.com (whether or not the authors recognize the potential problem with excluding that particular result from the table is unknown at this point; I have not finished reviewing the paper).

What of the many rankings? The website ranking?

I thought it was based on how many times the website was mentioned. That’s how Reddit-save and foreign policy are too.

Nice try FBI, you know I can’t read. /s

Best part is they'll eventually ban Genzedong, remove/scrub that reddit thread and random online haters (same variety making ridiculous claims about Lemmy's devs) will begin to claim the removed reddit sources actually were proof of actual genzedong users actually physically attacking Uyghurs.

It's almost inevitable with the game of telephone they're playing. Just launder something enough time through enough sources while being vague and generous with words and it magically becomes fact to everyone but super serious and honest academics (e.g. not the type who write this garbage) who really don't impact the discourse at all anyways as if one discovered it and wrote anything at all it'd probably be a 1-2line citation in some voluminous work mostly unrelated to the fact, a total aside that they researched it and found it false, which obviously will never be seen by anyone.

Half a million for this is both hilarious and sad. On the one hand that could have funded several researchers doing actual science for the public benefit so it's a tragedy, on the other they grifted half a million dollars for what isn't even 50k of work IMO. I mean this is stuff that random hobbyists do in their free time in about a month or less and post on subreddits about data visualization for free.

On the other hand money is not really an object when it comes to fighting the enemies of capital and empire so a small price to pay I'm sure. And better spent here (in their minds) than on researching actual hate groups and extremists like Nazis, channer-fash, alt-right, Qanon weirdos, etc which while it could be done to this caliber would obviously look a little lacking for the 500k considering there are private groups that do far better research on them and publish far better reports for far less money.

I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What's more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that's indistinguishable from being mad at that group.

Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don't align. They don't describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.

They did use a computer program to calculate "toxicity" and how threatening comments were: https://perspectiveapi.com/

It relies on this website to calculate both.

The measurements still seem somewhat subjective. You can test how "toxic" comments are here: https://perspectiveapi.com/

I'd say they probably know of his affiliations. I dont think this sort of paper gets written "randomly". So-called disinformation experts are by and large state operators, and Western states have been fervent anticommunists since 1917.

The horror!!!!!

Great points. If they bothered to do any actual analysis, though, they wouldn't have been able to reach the conclusion that we're extremists. "People who think the US should stop provoking and prosecuting wars that displace and kill millions" and "people who think children shouldn't starve" don't have the same ring as "far left extremism"; it wouldn't let them do the enlightened centrist, 'all extremes are bad'.

Jfc, chingchang? They can't even hide their racism when their trying to pretend they're not racist. These will be the same people who depict Xi as Winnie the Pooh while criticising the CPC's approach to Xinjiang and pretend that they don't see the racist connotations. Wankers.

Yeah, any paper worth its weight in flour would at the very least have an appendix with illustrative examples of the comments they find interesting or have "high toxicity". By just talking about all content in abstract with random asspull metrics they get to claim objectivity while presenting zero actual information. Typical for the kind of people who like to reduce countries to their GDP (per capita if you're lucky).

Edit: I didn't notice that they actually did include some in their appendix after 5 pages with 135 citations. So much bloat and there's even a couple Washington Post articles there. They definitely didn't even read a lot of those beyond the abstract. Either way the examples are just strewn around in the text and did not include their "toxicity level" so the point still stands. Actually worst "qualitative analysis" I've ever read tbh, and that's usually already the worst in data science. More like "pseudoscientific cherrypicking".

I can't believe they did this and then, by the looks of it, crowd-sourced a definition from reactionary corners of the fediverse. They're not giving western higher education a good name, are they?

The Juche necromancers are trying their best, and that's all we can ask for.

yeah, it's more in that vein of holodomor claims now, the arguments are mostly the same, there's nothing new to be gained from more posts about it

thank you, i feel honored to have such an award 🫡

They're tired of gaslighting people into becoming liberals, now they're doing it with machines. Whoever thought of letting misinformation giants like Google "teach" "AI" should be fired at.

As someone who did some natural language processing research in undergrad, they obviously have no idea what they're doing. To get meaningful data you need¹ to remove words such as "the", "is", "it", etc. And that's not the only normalization you need to do.

What's offensive for something claiming to be an academic paper is their lack of explanation of their data processing techniques. Meaningful conclusions can only be made if your data is reasonable. And to make sure you have meaningful data, especially when the source is extremely noisy human-generated online comments, you need to do several things to process your data before you can feed it into an analysis. The goal of publishing academic research is not only to publish a result, but to publish methodology to enable independent reproducibility: if you have the paper, and the data, you should be able to follow the methods and come to the same conclusions; if you can't, the paper's bad. Yes, these details are boring, and a lot of people will put them in an appendix instead of in the main body of the paper, but if you're being honest you do provide these details.

They also don't even pretend to be objective; the paper reads more like a speculative opinion piece on sociology than it does a "data-driven" paper. Their assumptions drive their analysis and thus their conclusions. Moreover, when they attempt to make the distinction between TOXICITY and SEVERE_TOXICITY, they are not making these objective categories: the definitions they give are pure air and the distinction between the two categories is purely subjective.

It's honestly an embarassment; I wouldn't want my name on a paper of such poor quality. I wouldn't want my university to be named on a paper of such poor quality (nor would I think the university would want themselves to be named on such a paper).

Either these are genuinely ignorant undergrads who don't realize that they're producing wildly questionable and meaningless "research", or they're dishonest grifters taking federal taxpayer money² and producing garbage.

Being published in ArXiv is not automatically a bad thing; but it makes me wonder if they were rejected from peer-reviewed journals. There's no argument that they didn't want to or were unable to spend money to submit to a "real" journal since they are receiving outside funding.

Well, yes. But also, as long as most comments has "the" at least once, "the" will be listed.

Orange gallbladder golfcart