Mapping the Dutchophone Fringe on Telegram

Content warning: Since this summer school report concerns the online activities of fringe groups and actors, it displays instances of racist, homophobic, and antisemitic discourse, as well as other forms of hateful speech and imagery.

Abstract

Building on previous research on deplatformed actors on Telegram (Rogers, 2020), this project maps and characterizes the platform’s Dutch-speaking ‘fringe’, which we generally define as the set of actors and groups with ties to Flanders or the Netherlands whose harmful discourse might resist (or be perceived to resist) the moderation efforts of mainstream social media. The focus of our investigation is thereby on a growing and diverse network of channels mined on the basis of a seed of Dutch-speaking conspiracy theorists and proponents of extreme right-wing politics. Combining digital methods and close readings, the project makes an empirical contribution to the international study of potentially harmful online discourse by 1) charting the relationships between right-wing (political) channels and conspiracy theories, 2) documenting the converging narratives that circulate in the network, including anti-progressive discourse, anti-mainstream discourse, anti-government discourse, Covid-19 policy criticism, conspiracy theories such as 'the Great Reset' and Qanon, and 3) drawing attention to appeals to (political) action and violence.

Background

Telegram is a messaging app that enables users to either chat one-on-one or through private groups with several individual users, quite similar to how WhatsApp works. Privacy and security are deemed very important by Telegram, and users who join tend to be looking for a platform that provides them with a sense of control (Rogers, 2020). In addition, Telegram has an extremely loose approach to content moderation compared to other social media and together with the platforms focus on security, this creates a welcoming environment for extreme views. Telegram differs from other messaging apps as they have introduced one-to-many communication via so called channels. These channels, which are the object of the present study, enable users to communicate with large groups of people.

At the moment of writing, Telegram is gaining in popularity, particularly as a site for antagonistic discourse that is increasingly often deplatformed from mainstream platforms such as facebook or twitter. Building on previous research on deplatformed actors on Telegram (Rogers, 2020), this project sets out to map and characterize the platform’s Dutch-speaking ‘fringe’, which we generally define as the set of actors and groups with ties to Flanders or the Netherlands whose harmful discourse might resist (or be perceived to resist) the moderation efforts of mainstream social media. The initial focus of our investigation is thereby on Dutch-speaking conspiracy theorists and proponents of extreme right-wing politics.

Our focus on right-wing actors is inspired by recent studies such as Sterkenburg’s ethnographic investigations into the Dutch far right, and Ponsaers’ survey of the rise of far right identitarian movements in Flanders, both of which reveal a highly diverse network of groups and individuals, with wide-ranging historical roots and varying ties to the political mainstream, as well as a very active online presence. Building on investigative journalism, Ponsaers for instance discusses how the Flemish identitarian group ‘Schild and Vrienden’ used Discord groups as an organizational platform and incubator for hateful memes. Similarly, Sterkenburg maps the recruitment and online information sharing practices surrounding the Dutch group ‘studiegenootschap Erkenbrand’. Both studies thereby foreground the potential of the analysis of far-right networks and discourse online as a means of charting the scope, ideas and imaginaries of (fringe) movements and actors. Furthermore, our decision to include conspiracy theorists within the initial scope of the investigation was motivated by the timeframe of the analysis (2020-2021), which coincides with the global coronavirus pandemic, as well as an observed convergence between right-wing discourse and a range of conspiracy theories.

Research questions

Our mapping of the Dutch-speaking fringe on Telegram is driven by two research questions:

1. Which fringe Telegram channels can we identify and how are they connected on a structural level?
2. What are some of the prominent narratives that circulate within this network of connected Telegram channels?

Data and methods

For technical reasons, we limit our initial analysis to open Telegram channels that can be previewed from a browser. As suggested by Julia Ebner (2019), these channels are important repositories of information and ideas, which might in turn be shared in other channels and groups. They therefore make an important resource to analyse.

Starting from an expert seed list of Telegram channels pertaining to Dutch-speaking right-wing or conspiracist actors and organizations, we used a custom scraper to expand the seed to 215 channels based on ‘forwarded from’ links in posts. The full textual contents and images of all channels were subsequently scraped, resulting in dataset comprising ca. 370.000 messages.

As follows from the top 30 channels by number of posts shown in Fig. 1, the retrieved channels are diverse in nature, with names recalling Donald Trump and r/The_Donald (e.g. ‘DeDonald_Nieuwsfeed’), QAnon and other conspiracies (e.g. ‘QNederland’, ‘illuminati_ontmaskeren’), patriotic resistance (e.g. ‘Pattriottisch_Verzet’, ‘verzetsblaadje’), nationalism (‘bataafsenieuws’, ‘BataafseMossel’), and redpilling or awakening (e.g. ‘wakkerworden’, ‘wakkeren’).

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In order to address our first research question, we create a network representation of relations between the scraped channels based on ‘forwarded from’ links in posts. In the network, nodes represent channels, and if a ‘forwarded from’ link exists between a source channel and a target channel, we add a directed edge between both channel nodes.

In order to address our second research question, we designed a set of queries to identify seven thematic subsets in the data (posts) corresponding to salient narratives. To this end, we tokenized the posts, retained tokens with a frequency of over 1000, filtered these for noise and ambiguous terms, and inductively coded them into categories. We used the words for each category as a basis to iteratively design queries for the seven categories. Finally, using among others 4cat and Gephi, we conducted a quali-quantitative analysis of posts in the seven thematic data subsets in order to identify salient narratives, actors, ideologies and links.

Findings

The network we observed exponentially grew in a year.

Previous research has indicated that a number of fringe actors moved to Telegram after being deplatformed from facebook or twitter. (Rogers, 2020) It can be hypothesized that events such as Donald Trump’s removal from twitter around the time of the January 2021 Capitol riots might have inspired other actors to move to Telegram in response to the platform policies of mainstream social media. In light of these dynamics, we can indeed observe that the network that was derived from our dataset seems to grow exponentially over time. As illustrated in Figure 2 and Figure 3, we can see that more channels were created over the past year and that the number of forwards between channels seems to grow accordingly.

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On a structural level, the Flemish far right appears to remain rather insular, while the Dutch far right is tightly embedded within the ‘conspiracy’ network