They’re just taking liberal bullshit they heard from the media and giving it an academic veneer, which the aforementioned liberal media will then cite as fact. It’s a bullshit ouroboros.

1. State department cooks up some new bullshit (tankies have cooties).

2. State department bots spread the claim on . Idiots breathlessly regurgitate it.

3. “Respectable” outlets cite random fascists to say that tankies have cooties.

4. Wizened “academics” read their favorite liberal slop magazines and learn that tankies have cooties.

5. Said “academics” come up with the conclusion that tankies have cooties and bullshit the rest of the paper.

6. Other “academics” cite said paper to say that tankies have cooties.

7. Media cites “multiple independent Scientific Studies^TM^” (never mind the million dollar grant from the Adolf Hitler Institute for Political Studies) proving that tankies have cooties.

8. “Tankies have cooties” becomes an established fact substantiated by the literature.

It’s more obvious in this case because of just how badly written and nakedly dishonest the article is, but it’s not anything new. Ghouls donate a cumulative billions to Western universities every year with the understanding that the neoliberal ideology factories will churn this kind of slop out to drown the Western mind in a deluge of bullshit.

And they don’t even have to hand over bags of money with dollar signs on them to get academics to write this shit, they have been immersed in ideology for so long that they actually believe they are making valuable contributions to the field (and in a sense, they are; it’s a return-on-investment for the aforementioned ghouls).

Taking things=bad as an article of faith is basically the entire premise of social media analysis papers. They're very fed-coded and are virtually all published by grants to combat "misinformation", which is vaguely defined and mostly seems to mean, "whatever is against the ruling class liberal status quo PR teams want to be true today".

Here is a Nature paper in this vein about "pro-Russian misinformation" from just last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-60653-y . It is just as meaningless and thing=bad-y as this post's paper, but it is written better, has better graphics, uses more sophisticated jargon, and comes from a more prestigious group.