The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Giuliana Sorce, focussing on the use of Telegram by the Identitarian movement in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. This is a far-right movement which emerged first on Facebook and moved to Telegram after being deplatforming there; it especially targets what it perceives as an Islamic threat to European societies.
This paper explores why and how this movement uses Telegram as a key channel for its activities. It conducted a snowball sampling from a starting-point of three key accounts and eventually examined 13 Telegram channels with some 14,000 posts up to April 2023 …
The next speaker in this rapid ECREA 2024 session is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on the German news coverage of Telegram as a new and challenging social media platform. Telegram has become a hugely contested object in popular discourse; it has marketed itself as a strongly pro-democracy and pro-free speech platform, but is also accused of allowing hate speech and child abuse materials on its channels – notably Telegram founder Pavel Durov was recently arrested in France for this reason.
Telegram has also become a refuge for the deplatforming, and a space for alternative, conspiracist, and far-right groups. The …
The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session on Telegram are Lars Rinsdorf and Kathrin Müller, whose interest is in hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracist social media spheres. Telegram is a very attractive tool for the publics populating such spheres; it is a hybrid communication platform that is especially well suited to the interests of such publics.
What are the actor identities, communicative practices, and frames of relevance emerging in such (counter)publics? The project explored this through expert interviews pointing researches to relevant topics and channels; then examined some 50 such channels closely through qualitative analysis; gathered some 2,700 posts from …
The first full day at the ECREA 2024 conference begins for me with a panel on Telegram and politics. The first presenter is Corinna Peil, whose interest is in COVID-19 conspiracy narratives on Telegram. How do the people who disseminate such narratives understand content moderation interventions?
Content moderation is a fundamental service that social media platforms provide, but this also generates accusations of censorship; exactly how content moderation works is also a subject of (sometimes conspiracist) ‘folk theories’ about the power and practices of social media platforms, however. The pandemic heightened this further, as it pushed platforms to implement stronger …
After a brief excursion to Helsinki for a workshop and a guest lecture, I have made my way to Ljubljana for the great biennial European communication conference, ECREA 2024. After the opening ceremony and a pipe organ performance (!) of Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers”, we start now with a keynote by Vesna Leskošek, addressing the conference theme of ‘communication and social (dis)order’.
She begins by introducing the idea of the welfare state, as a concept that may be in decline in the present time. But the welfare state maintains social order, social structures, and social institutions; it was one …
