“No Central Stage”: Telegram-based activity during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong

Abstract

We examine Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong thus presenting the first study of a large Telegram-aided protest movement. We contribute to both - scholarship on Hong Kongese protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring the efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders - those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, - such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.

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

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Collective Action on Facebook and Telegram During the Russia–Ukraine War

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Displacement and Return in the Internet Era: How Social Media Captures Migration Decisions in Northern Syria

“…In addition to Twitter and Facebook, the role of which have been more widely studied (Khamis et al (2012), Metzger and Siegel (2019)), we extend analysis to include data from Telegram "an encrypted platform that is harder for governments to monitor" (Mitts (2019)). Much of the research on Telegram has focused on its use by ISIS (Prucha (2016), McDowell-Smith et al (2017), Yayla and Speckhard (2017)), though Telegram's privacy policies also support civilians and protest movements worldwide (Urman et al (2020)). Though much work has been dedicated to the role of social media in constructing violence narratives, it also plays a vital role in migration movement (Frouws et al (2016), Miconi (2020), Sánchez-Querubín and Rogers ( 2018)).…”