The Tankie Network: How Far-Left Extremists Evolve in Online Spaces

Written by deplatform | Published 2025/03/26
Tech Story Tags: online-extremism | left-wing-extremism | tankies-reddit-study | internet-subcultures | online-extremism-research | digital-propaganda-networks | left-wing-extremism-on-reddit | reddit-political-clusters

TLDRThis study investigates "tankie" communities on Reddit, analyzing over 1.3M posts to understand their ideology, discourse patterns, and network connections. Findings reveal their distinct vocabulary, higher toxicity levels, and migration to decentralized platforms post-deplatforming.via the TL;DR App

Authors:

(1) UTKUCAN BALCI, Binghamton University, United States;

(2) MICHAEL SIRIVIANOS, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus;

(3) JEREMY BLACKBURN, Binghamton University, United States.

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

A DATA

B NAMED ENTITIES

Table 9 presents the top 20 named entities, their frequency, and the percentage of posts they appear in within far-left subreddits other than tankie subreddits.

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.


Written by deplatform | Deplatform
Published by HackerNoon on 2025/03/26