Mapping Extremist Discourse Communities on Telegram

• In Event: Negative Side-Effects of Social Media: Extremism & Hate Speech

Abstract

This project seeks to map discourse communities created by Russian neo-Nazis on the application Telegram. It will assess the extent to which discourse communities created by neo-Nazis identified through qualitative analysis in prior research are still present in a novel Telegram dataset and can be identified quantitatively through Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and network analysis. It will then compare the results of Louvian and Girvan-Newman network community detection methods and the topics assigned to each community to see if the underlying structure of association between topics is robust to the use of different methods for community detection. This work will contribute to an understanding of how extremist groups operate online, and contextualize future work on the online propagation and consumption of mis- and disinformation by extremist groups.

Author

• Sara Morrell, Northeastern University