The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.

  • throwhimintheriver
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    1 year ago

    i’m thinking about their claim that “the predominant topic of discussion” among tankies is the uyghur “genocide.” like bro there’s 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.

    • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:

      A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.

      Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.

    • redtea
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      1 year ago

      Even then, most of the time, it’s because someone comes along and says, “You claim that China has built railways but don’t you know about Xinjiang, which means there can’t be any semiconductors”.

    • CicadaSpectre
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      1 year ago

      Tbh, I see more posts on here about the war in Ukraine than Xinjiang lately. We only ever talked about it because liberals were obsessed with creating a genocide narrative. Now that their short attention spans have moved on to the next act of dehumanization, why would we bother talking about something we know isn’t real? The only reason we ever have to discuss half the mainstream topics about China is to deconstruct the myths around them.

      Not that these “researchers” would know that.

      • ImOnADiet
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        1 year ago

        yeah, it’s more in that vein of holodomor claims now, the arguments are mostly the same, there’s nothing new to be gained from more posts about it