Online publicity and outcomes of individual politically salient criminal cases in an authoritarian regime: evidence from Russia

Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non- Institutionalized Actors on Telegram

“…With a known population, researchers base their study on a deliberate a priori decision about which channels to include. In Telegram, actors (i.e., creators and/or administrators) set up channels to send messages to their subscribers, which are signed with the chan nel's name (Urman & Katz, 2022a). Here, the researcher must rely on channel names to determine whether a full collection of channels assumed to represent a particular actor is reasonable and possible, or whether a partial collection is equally valuable, and how sampling can be best achieved in that case.…”

“…Counterexamples include Urman and Katz (2022a), who used snowball sampling start ing with only one highly relevant seed channel to map and analyze the far-right network in Germany, and later characterized the channel clusters. Baumgartner et al (2020) disre garded the assumption described by design in their attempt to map a maximal part of the telegram network to analyze the platform characteristics.…”

“…In such approaches, communities of actors are identified via community detection algorithms applied to the sample's forwarding network. The particular algorithms used differ across studies as Urman & Katz (2022a) apply the Louvain Method (Blondel et al, 2008), while Zehring & Domahidi (2023) rely on the Infomap algorithm (Rosvall & Bergstrom, 2008). Their common subsequent step of analysis is the classification of com munities by, for example, shared sources or similarities in content propagation based on a manual classification of sample actors of each community, implicitly assuming that their characteristics apply to the entire community (Zehring & Domahidi, 2023).…”

“…minimal moderation effort. The platform's privacy and anonymity make it a safe space for non-institutionalized activism in repressive political settings, such as Russia or Hong Kong (Herasimenka, 2022;Urman & Katz, 2022a, 2022b. It also provides a relatively secure communication environment for political extremists, conspiracy theorists, or deplatformed actors (Rogers, 2020).…”