Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml
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Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml
(I personally wouldn't describe them as "left-wing" but that's the terminology the authors chose)
https://arxiv.org/html/2507.23699v1
A couple of the takeaways -- neither of which should be a surprise to anybody who's spent time on lemmygrad:
Our analysis shows that Lemmygrad.ml’s top two communities, c/genzedong and c/genzhouarchive, are associated with tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou. Furthermore, our findings suggest that tankies’ platform migration resulted in an increase in user activity and toxicity on Lemmygrad.ml
Our analysis suggests a concerning endorsement of authoritarian actions and extremist rhetoric on Lemmygrad.ml
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Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml
(I personally wouldn't describe them as "left-wing" but that's the terminology the authors chose)
https://arxiv.org/html/2507.23699v1
A couple of the takeaways -- neither of which should be a surprise to anybody who's spent time on lemmygrad:
Our analysis shows that Lemmygrad.ml’s top two communities, c/genzedong and c/genzhouarchive, are associated with tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou. Furthermore, our findings suggest that tankies’ platform migration resulted in an increase in user activity and toxicity on Lemmygrad.ml
Our analysis suggests a concerning endorsement of authoritarian actions and extremist rhetoric on Lemmygrad.ml
@thenexusofprivacy
Some highly problematic aspects here.First, as you note, throwing around the term "leftwing extremism" in this political climate is distinctly unhelpful on the part of the authors. Invitation here for folks to normalize the term "campists" when describing this element, to dissociate them from literate leftists or anyone else on the liberatory spectrum.
> While extensive research has been conducted on right-wing extremism within decentralized networks […] the exploration of far-left extremism on these platforms is still in its infancy.
Indicating that these people intend to continue their research into "far-left extremism" on the fedi. Not good
> Using a custom crawler, we collect 91,271 posts from 465 communities (Lemmy’s equivalent of subreddits) between August 17, 2019, and April 30, 2022
So, these people are using a scraper to surveil the fediverse. Was consent granted by the communities under scrutiny? One imagines not
> Monthly Perspective Analysis. Perspective API (Perspective API 2018) is a tool developed by Google which measures abusive or hateful content within texts, providing scores from 0 to 1, lowest to highest. Using Perspective API, previous research on Mastodon (He et al. 2023) and Pleroma (Hassan et al. 2021) …
So, people are using a scraper *designed by Google* to surveil the fediverse on an ongoing basis, to monitor *Google's* idea of what comprises objectionable speech.
The fediverse is not a habitat for guinea pigs. Do the authors of this paper even have accounts here? It's entirely true that the campists on Lemmygrad have obnoxious pro-authoritarian views. But considering the Future Work summary of this paper, this kind of research can possibly be interpreted as a reactionary attack on the fedi. Who else do they consider "leftwing extremists"?
> While this work highlights the presence of left-wing extremism on the Decentralized Web, it is limited to a single instance on a single platform. Our study emphasizes the critical need to explore the prevalence and dynamics of left-wing extremism within the Decentralized Web …
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T thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@thenexusofprivacy
Some highly problematic aspects here.First, as you note, throwing around the term "leftwing extremism" in this political climate is distinctly unhelpful on the part of the authors. Invitation here for folks to normalize the term "campists" when describing this element, to dissociate them from literate leftists or anyone else on the liberatory spectrum.
> While extensive research has been conducted on right-wing extremism within decentralized networks […] the exploration of far-left extremism on these platforms is still in its infancy.
Indicating that these people intend to continue their research into "far-left extremism" on the fedi. Not good
> Using a custom crawler, we collect 91,271 posts from 465 communities (Lemmy’s equivalent of subreddits) between August 17, 2019, and April 30, 2022
So, these people are using a scraper to surveil the fediverse. Was consent granted by the communities under scrutiny? One imagines not
> Monthly Perspective Analysis. Perspective API (Perspective API 2018) is a tool developed by Google which measures abusive or hateful content within texts, providing scores from 0 to 1, lowest to highest. Using Perspective API, previous research on Mastodon (He et al. 2023) and Pleroma (Hassan et al. 2021) …
So, people are using a scraper *designed by Google* to surveil the fediverse on an ongoing basis, to monitor *Google's* idea of what comprises objectionable speech.
The fediverse is not a habitat for guinea pigs. Do the authors of this paper even have accounts here? It's entirely true that the campists on Lemmygrad have obnoxious pro-authoritarian views. But considering the Future Work summary of this paper, this kind of research can possibly be interpreted as a reactionary attack on the fedi. Who else do they consider "leftwing extremists"?
> While this work highlights the presence of left-wing extremism on the Decentralized Web, it is limited to a single instance on a single platform. Our study emphasizes the critical need to explore the prevalence and dynamics of left-wing extremism within the Decentralized Web …
@ophiocephalic great pointsl. @rwg and @rra 's https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00323-9 has best practices for researches on fedi, and goes into detail on the expectations of privacy and history of poor research.
(Of course, fedi is not monolithic, and the norms on Lemmy quite possibly do assume consent. But it's more complex than that: Mastodon posts, from peoiple who aren't consuming consent, can federate to Lemmy, so get swept up in this.)
Also worth mentioning: Google's Perspective API also has known racial biases - see https://civic.mit.edu/index.html%3Fp=2402.html for example.
