This community is less focused on traditional conservative values and more prone to propaganda and political conspiracies.ĭuring February, popular posts within this community included “ the anti-war right,” “ Justin Trudeau is a Communist,” and “ Convoy USA may be a Deep State setup.” Regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine, views are similar to those found in the Trumpist community, such as “ Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine under a Trump administration.” Moreover, most participants consider the war a result of weak leadership in the United States. Most well-known are Lin Wood (690,961 subscribers), Sydney Powell (428,010 subscribers), JamesOKeefeIII (410,187 subscribers), and Stew Peters (336,374 subscribers). Fuentes is the host of America First Political Action Conference and, in the posts, declares that he is “rooting for Russia.” (Source: archive )Ĭlose to the Trumpist Telegram but forming a distinct community, what we defined as anti-liberal propagandists, we found a series of channels linked to public personalities who challenged the 2020 election results. Screencap of posts to the Telegram channel, taken on February 24, 2022. Because this study defines communities in terms of these cross-channel interactions, we identified a number of communities with similar ideologies and like-minded topical interests that nonetheless formed distinct communities due to limited interactions with each other on the platform, often framing the same topic differently. After downloading the data in February 2022, we conducted a modularity analysis in Gephi to detect “communities” in the dataset, based off of links most frequently shared and forwarded posts, to understand how they are related by user interactions. To conduct this analysis, the DFRLab built a dataset comprising 5,955 channels or chats by requesting data from Telegram’s API, using 79 channels devoted to US politics with a high number of subscribers as starting points to discover additional channels. US users are estimated to be around 2 percent of the total Telegram audience, or approximately 10 million users. Initially developed in Russia, Telegram has become popular in post-Soviet states, especially Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The cloud-based app is surpassed only by WhatsApp (2 billion users worldwide), Facebook Messenger (1.3 billion users), and WeChat (1.2 billion users, primarily in China and the Chinese diaspora). Telegram is the fourth most popular messaging app worldwide, with 550 million users in 2021. Understanding the nuances may be helpful to build bridges to bring some of their audiences back to civic and democratic debates and stop further radicalization, especially with the 2022 US midterm elections on the horizon. This study aims to shed light on the dynamics of the different Telegram communities in the United States discussing extremist or fringe politics. However, extremism is a far-reaching label that may obscure political and communicational dynamics occurring in Telegram channels. Telegram’s growth appears to have been driven by political extremists fleeing from the moderation policies of major social media platforms. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, 1:21-cv-011169.In the United States, Telegram has emerged as a popular messaging app among right-wing groups. The state bar said Wood would not lose his law license if he failed to be evaluated, but he could lose it at the end of the disciplinary investigation.Ī spokeswoman for the state bar did not respond to a request for comment. vice president.Īs part of its investigation, the bar wants Wood to undergo a mental health examination, something the conservative attorney has argued violates his First Amendment rights. The Georgia state bar in May launched an investigation into Wood after he allegedly attacked two of his former colleagues, as well as embraced conspiracy theories and called for the execution of the former U.S. Wood repeatedly pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of former President Donald Trump. Wood, via the Telegram messaging app, on Wednesday wrote that he will "never quit fighting against a corrupt legal system and the corrupt, politically agenda-driven State Bar of Georgia."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |