  Social media's role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of
intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online
hate, mis/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming
majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper,
we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring
left-wing extremism. We focus on "tankies," a left-wing community that first
arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved
to support what they call "actually existing socialist countries," e.g., CCP
run China, the USSR, former soviet countries, and North Korea. We collect 1.3M
posts from 53K authors from tankies subreddits, and explore the position of
tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we
find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left
community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and
conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the
theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level
political events rather than social issues in comparison to other far-left
communities. Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying
behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an
organized response to deplatforming events.
