1/ It appears that we are likely reaching a saturation point in new membership for QAnon Telegram channels. Taking a look at some of the more popular channels created from the Twitter/Parler exodus it appears that membership is reaching a plateau.
2/ What we are not seeing is a drop in membership. Now that is not surprising as most users will create a Telegram account and stop using it without leaving the groups if they loose interest (I think the basic security setting is the account self destructs in 6 months).
3/ Membership alone is not a great way to calculate community health. Views, average post reach and engagement rate by reach do provide some better insight. Views provide insight into how a community is reacting to the content that is being shared.
4/ When looking at the peaks and valleys in views we can correlate these to events of significance to the community (e.g. the inauguration). Moreover, though membership is slowing, average post reach and engagement rate by reach are on average increasing.
5/ This would indicate that a fair amount of the community on telegram are viewing/consuming the content shared in these channels, even though the amount of content being shared in decreasing.
6/ International QAnon communities have had a home on Telegram for almost two years. What we can see when looking at a sample of these is the impact of deplatforming on the growth of international channels with the exodus of QAnon from Twitter and Parler.
7/ We can see that January 6 and the inauguration had a positive impact on community growth for international QAnon. This also translate to an increase in views, average post reach and engagement rate by reach.
8/ Though it has slowed down, the QAnon community on Telegram is stabilizing and appears to be healthy. If that will remain the case only time will tell but this is where we stand a month post insurrection.
9/ Using smat-app to look at some popular QAnon terms on telegram we can see a stability forming following the deplatforming of QAnon.
10/ It is not only on telegram where we have seen this growth, there is also an increase on Gab. The black grab is from today and the white grab is from Jan 9. Groups have doubled and tripled in size since the insurrection on Gab.
11/ The largest of these groups has passed the largest QAnon group that existed on Facebook.. This same group had around 25k members in July when Facebook took action against QAnon. The QAnon community on Gab was dying prior to QAnon being deplatformed.
12/ QAnon has also found it ways to other alternative sites but these communities are much smaller, though still important as they represent a distinct "flavour" of QAnon, which is something to keep an eye on. For the moment it appears that Gab & Telegram are the main QAnon hubs.
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