Mainstream and Hyperpartisan News Framing of Telegram as an Alternative Platform

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 functionalist understanding of Telegram is as a tool for the far right, but its broader role in the wider media system has yet to be fully theorised. Media coverage of Telegram has a discursive power to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers into political discourse, and an analysis of such coverage can thus help us determine what Telegram actually is.

This study examined some 2,900 German media articles about Telegram through overall topic modelling, frame analysis of a selection of 19 articles, and speaker frequency analysis of 109 articles with Telegram in the heading, focussing here on Welt, Spiegel, Bild, and four far-right alternative news outlets. Coverage increased substantially with anti-lockdown protests in mid-2020, and especially following Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine.

Topic modelling of mainstream media shifted from a focus on data protection, user rights, and alternative platforms through its uses in Islamic terrorism (and its criminal prosecution) and far-right extremism, and further to a focus on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Alternative media focussed more strongly on social media’s role in mis- and disinformation. Mainstream and alternative media also framed Telegram as a source of news (e.g. about the wars); as an alternative counter-source; as a tool to organise and mobilise; as a site of criminal activity and terrorist plotting; as a target of (sometimes unsuccessful) government sanctions, especially for hate speech; and as a more secure alternative to WhatsApp.

Those who got to speak in such news coverage were predominantly government, law enforcement, and judicial representatives (in both mainstream and alternative media, though with different framing); other groups were considerably less represented. There was also a high degree of editorialisation in the news coverage of both mainstream and alternative media; here too the direction of such editorialising was very different, of course. Overall, then, coverage is highly ambivalent, and while both sides have a similar frame repertoire it is being deployed for very different arguments.