Covid-19 Protesters and the Far Right on Telegram: Co-Conspirators or Accidental Bedfellows?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of a new protest movement, positioned against government lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and related measures. Efforts to control misinformation by digital platforms resulted in take downs of key accounts and posts. This led some of these protest groups to migrate to platforms with less stringent content moderation policies, such as Telegram. Telegram has also been one of the destinations of the far right, whose deplatforming from mainstream platforms began a few years ago. Given the co-existence of these two movements on Telegram, the article examines their connections. Empirically, the article focused on Irish Telegram groups and channels, identifying relevant protest movements and collecting their posts. Using computational social science methods, we examine whether far-right terms and discourses are present and how this varies across different clusters of Telegram Covid-19 protest groups. In addition, we examine which actors are posting far-right content and what kind of roles they play in the network of Telegram groups. The findings indicate the presence of far-right discourses among the COVID-19 groups. However, the existence of these groups was not solely driven by the extreme right, and the incidence of far-right discourses was not equal across all COVID-19 protest groups. We interpret these findings under the prism of the mediation opportunity structure: while the far right appears to have taken advantage of the network opportunity structure afforded by deplatforming and the migration to Telegram, it did not succeed in diffusing its ideas widely among the COVID-19 protest groups in the Irish Telegram.

From criticism to conspiracies: The populist discourse of COVID-19 sceptics in Germany’s Querdenken community on Telegram

“…By categorising channels and groups according to the topics found in previous studies (Curley et al, 2022;Holzer, 2021;Zehring and Domahidi, 2023), the construction of (far-right) populist narratives and frames, and the politicisation of a public health crisis within specific communities by combining topics/issues was explored beyond general topic modelling. The results show that narrative and frame construction follow clear mechanisms of personifying threats, most obvious in references to Merkel, Spahn (government actors at the time) and their conservative party alliance as out-actors, but also current government of social democrats, greens, and liberals.…”

“…A total of 152 channels and groups were identified, and their entire chat histories were extracted as well (n1 = 1,426,938 messages). Based on previously-identified relevant categories (Curley et al, 2022;Holzer, 2021;Zehring and Domahidi, 2023), a broad categorisation of the contents in each channel and group was made to create smaller sub-samples: Querdenken (n = 617,119; movement infrastructure featuring the name), Activism (n = 273,001; social and political activism), Info (n = 316,126; general information about pandemic-related issues), News (n = 95,284; news outlets and stories), Protest (n = 69,864; information and organisation of protests), Lawyers (n = 33,438; legal advice) and Doctors (n = 22,106; health advice). For the semi-automated quantitative content analysis, only messages featuring exclusively text (n2 = 1,273,744) were kept in the sample.…”

“…This could be owed to its infrastructure, which lacks content moderation and provides politicisation and radicalisation potential (Urman and Katz, 2022), thus generating a flow of unchecked and unverified information, making the platform a breeding ground for mis- and disinformation (Brubaker, 2020). For instance, Curley et al (2022) found narratives about the great reset (nativist replacement conspiracy) or Bill Gates (as anti-elite and anti-vaccine) in most clusters in an Irish Telegram network.…”

Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify COVID-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media

“…After several months of malicious activity, Meta announced that an extensive anti-vaccine network, inauthentically behaving as a “brigade,” was identified and removed from all its platforms. Detecting CIB manipulative operations is challenging (Borges do Nascimento et al, 2022 ; Broniatowski et al, 2022 ; Curley et al, 2022 ) for digital platforms' security algorithms in the current scenario, where almost 5 billion people interact via social media.…”

“…Detecting CIB manipulative operations is challenging (Borges do Nascimento et al, 2022;Broniatowski et al, 2022;Curley et al, 2022) for digital platforms' security algorithms in the current scenario, where almost 5 billion people interact via social media.…”