First, you should read the actual definition of fear mongering. Fear mongering "is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearmongering

Warning others with documented evidence of authoritarian propaganda is not fear mongering

justify pre-emptively trying to exclude an entire category of people you lump in your head as "tankies"? How am I supposed to evaluate the entire fediverse based upon your personal feelings about the anecdotes you have had that involved the fediverse?

Second, Tankies are defined as "authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

I don't lump together the entire Fediverse as tankie, I always explicitly say only a section of it users are and then properly warn if specific servers as well as .mls documented propaganda pushing and censorship of users who call them out on it. It is up to the user to decide what they want to do after. It's better to warn them and then encounter a tankie rather than have them encounter one without any context, they very well could and have walked away from the Fediverse because of it and then they go off to wherever and when someone asks about Lemmy/Threadiverse they incredibly likely to be the ones saying "That place is a a tankie hell hole"

Tankies are also typically the ones yelling at "libs" to "go back to reddit" whenever encountering pushback against their propaganda.

Third, your posted study has nothing to do with Tankies, just the inner working of moderation, defederations, labels etc. and how they're perceived by the average user. And again, you seem to like to use the term "fear mongering" to mean "Don't talk about them, don't tell anyone about them, just let them push their propaganda"