Actor Types in Telegram’s Ecology of Counterpublic Communities

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 such channels for qualitative analysis; and finally sought to explore these posting activities through in-depth interviews with 15 Telegram users to understand their usage and posting motivations.

It found an ecosystem within these communities that comprises a number of different functions: there are issue followers (who often have conspiracist views, especially on topics like Ukraine); special interest news providers (on a broad range of topics, often presenting their own content); alternative news providers (on broad topics, again, but presenting content from alternative news sites); missionaries (with esoteric views especially on scientific topics); top-focussed influencers (with a strong interest in conspiracy topics especially in foreign reporting); and multi-topic influencers (often with an esoteric focus, picking content from legacy media); and at the centre of this space are activists (with a wide range of topical interests).

User types within this ecosystem include especially naturopaths (looking for like-minded people, sceptical of science, and with news fatigue); self-confident researchers (with a broad media repertoire, use Telegram for topic research, extremism as an inspiration, and using Telegram as a stage to present themselves as topic experts); libertarian activists (who mobilise on Telegram, are profoundly sceptical towards mainstream media, and champion freedom of expression); and alienated media users (who exclusively use alternative media, reject mainstream media, and believe in conspiracy theories).

These groups are unevenly distributed across the ecosystem: naturopaths are almost exclusively missionaries, for instance; self-confident researchers are active across all except missionary and activist spaces; libertarians are mainly focussed on alternative news provision, multi-topic influence, topic-focussed influence, missionaries, and activists; and alienated media users are prominent across all except missionary spaces. Some such actors are thus positioned between publics and counterpublics, while others are much more strongly and exclusively acting as counterpublics.

Such uses also spread into real-life settings, and there is therefore a need to address Telegram use through more multi-faceted approaches rather than by taking a one-size-fits-all approach.