Disinformation and political counter-publics on Telegram

Course type: Seminar and exercise
Institution: Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences
Funding period: 01.04.2023 to 31.03.2024
Short title: Disinformation

Extract from the funding application: "The seminar looks at the global phenomenon of disinformation against the background of counter-publics on social platforms. The focus is on the role of Telegram as a platform for internet personalities in the conspiracy scene and a data source for the investigation of extremist movements."

^{christian wiediger / unsplash}

Review and results

Based on the current state of research and a methodological introduction to investigative digital ethnography, students of media and communication studies and political science analysed self-selected case studies on disinformation and conspiracy narratives in this project. The first section of the course focussed on the socio-technical conditions of origin, the supporters and argumentative characteristics of political conspiracy narratives from an interdisciplinary perspective.

In the second section, structured and unstructured data on the case studies was then collected via the Telegram api and the Telegram monitoring tool of the transfer partner Kollektiv data4transparency. The images, videos, texts and metadata were analysed using Jupyter notebooks. As the publicly accessible data was collected and analysed without the explicit consent of the senders, questions of ethics and data protection were also considered. In this way, the participants developed an understanding of disinformation and conspiracy narratives, data infrastructures and data analyses as well as data protection and IT security in the context of social platforms. By visualising the results, the participants also learned how to present their findings to the public.

Persons involved

Laura Laugwitz, M. Sc.

Communication Science, esp. Digital Journalism and Office for Digital Teaching, WiSo

Focal points:

Automated recommendations of messages on different platforms
Hate speech in digital communication
Interdisciplinary further development of methods for computational communication studies
Feminist perspectives in and on computer science and communication studies

Contact