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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

via https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13chr5f/mentions_of_the_word_fascism_and_its_derivatives/

Percentage of pages mentioning "fascism" and its derivative words, from January 1938 until December 1942. Darkest blue is front page, the lightest blue is 6+ pages. Letters at the bottom are months.

Source, based on data from the Pravda Digital Archive.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Comrade Gitler is helping us maintain peace in europe, until he very suddenly is not.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago

For someone that was canny enough of a backstabbing tyrant to murder his way into leadership it's always struck as me as strange that Stalin was taken by surprise when Hitler betrayed their treaty.

Everyone but him knew it was coming. There's no way he couldn't have known, even if he thought it would happen later he shouldn't have been surprised. Hating socialism in general and Bolshevism in particular was like half of their thing.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

This is extremely interesting. How many magazines and newspapers are digitized in the way you can analyze them like that? This is a simple word-based analyze, also those texts can be enriched with metadata, e.g. mentions of people can be marked with their identifiers in Wikidata.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

With Slavic languages it’s never a simple word-based analysis - they’re highly inflected so you need to lemmatise text first which is a bit hit or miss when done automatically. I assume author of the graph did that manually for fascism because it’s a loanword and there’s less ambiguity to account for but it gets tedious quite fast if you really get into it. I got into it once in my mother tongue (Polish) and that rabbit hole goes really deep. Here’s a brief overview of how that process looks like.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Some software solutions exist, e.g. War and Peace by Tolstoy can be downloaded with metadata, ids are assigned to all characters and when one character tells something to another, this is highlighted as “x speaks to y”, and you can run a community detection algorithms on this data. I think in the paper they’ve been mentioning some proprietary software. I suspect detecting who speaks to whom is even harder.

Also, some form of crowd sourcing probably should be possible. At least collecting scans is possible on wikisource and wikimedia commons.

Probably AI language models should be pretty good in distinguishing between linguistic ambiguities.

I dream for a time when such reports as in OP post will be a matter of work for an hour or two — because data will be already collected and clean.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

LLMs can’t deal with highly reflective languages at the moment. In English or Chinese you can assign tokens to entire words without having to account for word morphology (which is also why models fail at counting letters in words) but it falls apart quickly in Polish or Russian. The way models like ChatGPT work now is that they do their „reasoning” in English first and translate back to the query language at the end.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I would have to do some deep searches to plug in actual data, but based on how it feels:

Mentions of the word "fascism" and its derivatives on Lemmy

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

"There's no rise of fascism, we're maxed out!"

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

It's also for 2025. We're so maxed out, it flowed over into October through December and filled them up lol.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

It's eminently topical and (unlike corporate social media) not suppressed, so what did you expect?

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I was going to remind of how good “filtered keywords” function is, but suddenly it struck me I shouldn’t have seen this post in the first place. Apparently, I saw it because my block list had a flaw.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm on Android but will still check it out. Thanks.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

US Google searches for "fascist". "Fascism" had a similar peak now, but bigger peaks in 2017 and around covid.

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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