-- KamilaKoronska - 19 Sep 2023

Mapping Post-Truth Narraties:

Understanding Brazilian narratives about the war on Telegram through prompting

Team Members

Giulia Tucci, João Guilherme

Links

• Link(s) to video / poster / slides

Contents

1. Introduction

This sub-report is part of a broader project aiming to map problematic narratives about the Russian-Ukrainian war since the beginning of the new phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022. ‘Problematic narratives’ in this instance refer to the substance of persuasion campaigns, whether coordinated or organic and participatory.

We seek to identify these narratives to expose them as such and make them available to verification specialists as journalists, fact-checkers, disinformation researchers, human rights activists and educators. Typically these specialists work on single posts, producing fact-check’s or debunks of each. These single stories, however, may be part of larger narratives as described above.

In this report, we present both the step by step we created to make possible the analysis of Telegram data employing the GarganText tool and the path followed to answer the questions focused specifically in Brazil, made during the first week of the Summer School.

2. Research Questions

• Which strains of false information about the war in Ukraine emerge in Brazilian Telegram channels? Can we distill the main narratives?

• How does a leading AI platform make sense of the main keywords taken from problematic channels and construct their most significant narratives?

3. Methodology and Initial Datasets

The sequence of steps followed to develop the analysis are represented in Figure 1. First, relying on Telegram channels that spread problematic content about the Ukrainian war, we sourced additional channels by capturing their incoming and outgoing mentions and forwarding using TGSTAT ( tgstat.com). Using 4CAT to access the Telegram API, we downloaded the channels’ posts from February, 2022 to July, 2023.

The channel seeds and corresponding table were the following:

Seed channels

@guerranaucraniaultimasnoticias

@Grupos_Atualidades

@noticiasww

@ucraniavsrussia

@ucraniaerussia

@oinformantstarday

@falandodeguerra1

@canalartedaguerra

4. Findings

The network above was named after ChatGPT prompting results obtained after inserting each group of keywords in our prompt. Beyond naming, we also obtained a description of the content probably matching the keywords.

The topics resulting from prompts and the correspondent keywords are:

Supranational Intervention Narrative

Narrative: This narrative may suggest the idea that there is a supranational intervention or direction behind the events in Ukraine. The terms "centrobrics" and "supranational direction" can be used to imply the presence of hidden forces coordinating the situation and influencing the course of the conflict.

bad order hidden source

Words: Wave; dark picture; cryptic military communication; Russian losses; Ukrainian casualties (onda; quadro sombrio; comunicação militar enigmática; perdas russas; baixas ucranianas).

Neo-Ottoman Geopolitics and the Struggle for Influence

Narrative: This narrative may suggest that there is an ongoing geopolitical strategy involving Turkey, represented by the term "neo- Ottoman geopolitics." The narrative can emphasize the alleged Turkish ambition to expand its influence in the region and may use elements such as "Crimean Tatars" to promote this idea.

Words: BRICS, Ukraine migration, event, supranational board, submerged reality op, ‘great cauldron’ i.e. huge mixture (centrobrics ucrânia migração, evento, direção supranacional, realidade submersa op, grande caldeirão).

Narrative of Global Chaos and Conspiracy

Narrative: This narrative may suggest that the war in Ukraine is just a part of a larger scenario of global collapse and chaos. The terms "collapse," "second assassination," "coup," and "vaccines" can be used to insinuate the existence of hidden and powerful forces behind these events. The narrative may claim that secret laboratories are conducting sinister research involving unimaginable secrets, such as election manipulation and the dissemination of vaccines for malicious purposes.

Words: Russian borders, waves, Kurdish terrorists, neo-Ottomanist geopolitics, Crimean Tatars, own culture civilization, irks Russians, Syrian immigrants (Fronteiras russas, ondas, terroristas curdos, geopolítica neootomanista, tartaros crimeanos, própria civilização cultura, irrita russos, imigrantes sírios).

Viral Conspiracy Theories

Narrative: This narrative may suggest that a mysterious virus is being used as a weapon, affecting both Russian and Ukrainian military forces. Claims of a "wave" or sudden increase in disease cases can be used to reinforce this theory.

Words: collapse, humanity, coup, vaccines, election, second murder, laboratories did research, test, unimaginable secrets (colapso, humanidade, golpe, vacinas, eleição, segundo assassinato, laboratórios fizeram pesquisas, teste, segredos inimagináveis).

The network of narratives about the war that circulated in a sample of the Brazilian Telegram is presented in Figure 2. While the findings of the analyzed corpus align with the messages collected, the presence of mixed conspiracy theories within the Telegram groups posed a challenge for GarganText in effectively distinguishing and categorizing them within the network. Consequently, this blending of various theories diminished the significance of more specific and relatively less impactful false information, while elevating fringe conspiracy theories to the forefront.
Based on the relevant terms found this way, ChatGPT was able to trace back the narratives and produce labels compatible with the fringe content even using just a combination of a few keywords instead of the entire corpus inserted in Gargan Text. It is interesting that instead of corresponding to specific issues (like the pandemic or the war), the topics resulting from prompts bring different perspectives through which we could make sense of these events (if the pandemic is part of a conspiracy theory or just another example of global chaos and how the world is coming to an end; if the war is part of a supranational effort of known organizations or something made by hidden actors willing to secretly regain power).

Though generic, the topics correspond to the messages found on Telegram, and indicate an interesting way to generate hypotheses and trace back narratives assisted by generative A.I. based solely on keywords related to each content.

5. References

Gagolewski, M. and Tartanus, B. (2023). stringi: Fast and Portable Character String Processing Facilities. Available at: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringi/index.html.

Peeters, S. and Hagen, S. (2021). The 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit: A Modular Tool for Transparent and Traceable Social Media Research. SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3914892.

Wickham, H. (2021). tidyverse: Easily Install and Load the ‘Tidyverse’. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyverse.

Wickham, H. et al. (2023). readr: Read Rectangular Text Data. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/readr/index.html.