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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[–] Chana@hexbear.net 26 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Yes, absolutely. There's a self-reinforcing publication process for this, where once there are enough papers to cite you can just keep writing the same basic things over and over again, asserting them to be true because Dr. Adolph Mussolini et al said so in 2023 and the Freedom Burger Eagle Institute confirmed it in 2024 (neither substantiated the claim). And now there are 3 to cite for the next ghouls, and so on, and then you can start a Lemmy Extremism Studies Working Group funded by the German government and start making your own conferences and journals and so on ad infinitum so long as funding keeps coming in.

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