It's not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.
ELI5
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of biased source)
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Yeah. I hear the term tankie all the time and no one has given me a concise answer yet. Also devs are the people that make the product, you know, the developers. Not the people policing it's content.
Tankie is a term used derogatory that essentially refers to people who are self proclaimed communists that support the CCP and other authoritarian governments that label themselves as communist. I'm decently sure the term is a reference to the Tiananmen Square.
The tankie triad is a reference to the 3 biggest instances for them: lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net
Now in all honesty I have only seen a handful of bad faith actors. Usually it's because:
- They are extremely critical of the US and in extension Israel, which is completely valid because right now the US is a shithole
- They are extremely defensive of any communist parties. They deny any wrongdoings of the CCP as western propaganda, take the side of Russia over Ukraine, CCP over Taiwan and HK, etc.
To me it's hypocritical to be against the current authoritarian and fascist US, but also be supportive of the authoritarian CCP and Russia. It's ok to recognize some actions that the CCP has done as an objectively good thing (like modernization of public transport), but they also deny the fact that the CCP has done atrocious acts and essentially bully the neighbors (aka the rest of Asia).
For reference I have no issues with the idea of socialism or even communism, but the CCP is far from those ideals.
Also devs are the people that make the product, you know, the developers. Not the people policing it's content.
They also have the biggest Lemmy instance with lots of big communities where they enforce the “xi jin ping/putin/kim jung un/mao/stalin/etc… is good, west bad” policy under the name of “Rule 1”
You can click the links in the sidebar for what a tankie is.
But basically they're an extremist who believe in extraordinary violence, genocide and authoritarianism. They're also called red fascists, in that they share the same views and talking points of fascists, but with a pseudo-communist tinge.
Gotcha. Thank you for explaining it homie!
The term tankie came to be after instances of the USSR suppressing protests by driving tanks into the protestors. Like the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. This resulted in people, in the west, who are leftists, defending these actions, as some sort of necessity, in order to maintain communism. The defense of the extreme authoritarianism used here, IE using tanks to kill people, is where the term "Tankie" comes from.
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