Assessing the Identitarian Movement Network on Telegram

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. Some of these remain relatively small (with under 1,000 subscribers), but Identitarian leader Martin Sellner has some 58,000 subscribers.

Many of these posts shared key traits, referring to the movement as a whole as well as specific chapters and locations; it also highlighted its key targets and often mentioned specific media outlets it opposed. 44% of posts included calls to action, often at the local level in response to the housing of asylum seekers; 20% pointed to news and social media updates, and thereby established their own alternative media ecologies; 18% promoted informational and educational micropopulist resources aligned with the movement’s ideology, including even a so-called ‘counter-university’ pushing its agenda; 10% called for donations to the movement and explicitly shared donation account details, as well as engaging in political merchandising; 9% engaged with and targetted political opponents (such as Fridays for Future) or – more rarely – supported other protest movements, like farmers’ protests.

There were also notable cross-cultural differences, however. In Germany there is a strong regional presence, especially in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony; in Austria, Identitarian leader Martin Sellner’s account is more important than country or regional accounts; Swiss accounts are more focussed on pan-Germanic than specifically Swiss messaging. And of course there may also be further private channels used by this movement that are not covered by such analyses of the movement’s public face.