Telegram is now 30% bigger than Twitter, so it attracts more attention

Here are five recent studies that tell us how disinformation campaigns, protesters and far-right use it:
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1. Rogers looked at what happens to far right activists when they are removed from other platforms and choose to migrate to Telegram. Apparently, their audiences shrink once they move to T.:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803946

2. Our study by @polbots found that the audiences of these activists and similar sources engage with their content more actively than the audiences of mainstream news engage with trusted content https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/posts/junk-news-distribution-on-telegram-the-visibility-of-english-language-news-sources-on-public-telegram-channels/

3. @ISDglobal did a qualitative study of content that these activists share. It illustrates the above studies very well https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/a-safe-space-to-hate-white-supremacist-mobilisation-on-telegram/

4. Who helps to grow political networks on Telegram?

@AUrman21 & colleagues identified users they called 'brokers' - key figures who link new networks to the outside world and then make them more united

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ueds4/

5. Another @AUrman21 &Katz's study - has been read more than 33000 times(!) - shows that far right communities on Telegram are powerful but divided along national and ideological lines - we haven't seen much international far-right solidarity on T. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803946

Telegram is an exciting thing to study now, and more papers are coming - stay tuned!

here is a report (paywall) that suggests that Telegram might be a growing arena for state-backed disinformation campaigns - this originates in countries where Telegram is big like Russia/Iran

my comment was: as the audience of T grows, we'll see more this https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/01/15/us-extremist-telegram-have-infiltrated-russian-disinformation/