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Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml (arxiv.org)
submitted 1 year ago* by to c/slop@hexbear.net
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This study investigates the presence of left-wing extremism on the Lemmygrad.ml instance of the decentralized social media platform Lemmy, from its launch in 2019 up to a month after the bans of the subreddits r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou.

We conduct a temporal analysis on Lemmygrad.ml’s user activity, with also measuring the degree of highly abusive or hateful content. Furthermore, we explore the content of their posts using a transformer-based topic modeling approach.

Our findings reveal a substantial increase in user activity and toxicity levels following the migration of these subreddits to Lemmygrad.ml.

We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content.

Overall, our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of political extremism within decentralized social networks and emphasize the necessity of analyzing both ends of the political spectrum in research.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40188039

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[–] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

As far as I can tell, it was not published anywhere, which means it wasn't peer reviewed. It's on a preprint server and was presented at a conference. The former is basically no better than just putting it on Facebook, and the barrier to entry on the latter is very, very low. It's really easy to get low-quality shit accepted as a conference paper (I've presented tons of low-quality shit of my own at conferences).

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's in the proceedings of the conference in July: https://www.workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2024_44.pdf

    Proceedings are the publication part of conferences. Every conference paper ends up in proceedings, it is the only public conference artifact maintained after the conference ends outside of recordings of talks.

    As I said, conference quality and review varies wildly and by field. In math, for example, conferences are more prestigious and no, it is not "easy" to just do a conference instead of publishing in a journal. This is also true in many computer science, statistics, and machine learning fields, which is vaguely where this might fall, as a soft application of the methods. The entire subfield in which they are publishing is a joke, so I do not expect anything about social media topic modeling or sentiment analysis to be particularly insightful or academically honest, but this actually applies to many fields with seemingly "rigorous" peer review, which is frequently a very poor filter. Many boring and redundant papers get published in major journals simply because they come from famous labs, for example. And good papers are rejected for petty or self-interested reasons.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Publication in a conference proceeding doesn't usually count as "publication" in the usual sense. Proceedings aren't peer reviewed. The only qualification is being accepted at the conference, and since anyone can (and does) put on a conference, that doesn't carry a tremendous amount of weight.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Being accepted at the conference is peer review. The process is often identical to submitting to a journal. Submit, get accept/reject/opportunity to resubmit with improvements, and if accepted, attend the conference, often giving a talk.

    Conference organizers constantly have to recruit reviewers for this purpose.

    Proceedings include the accepted papers.

    And you are just wrong about the weight / prestige. It varies by field. In biology, conferences are much less prestigious. In engineering, sometimes conferences are the only thing anyone ever cares about and submits papers to. And there are many cases that blend the two, such as ACM, where conference papers can go into journal issues as well, and this spans many fields.

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