Our analysis of a large, multilingual corpus of conspiratorial and geopolitically charged Telegram channels—drawn from over 4,000 channels and more than 30 million posts collected between mid-2022 and mid-2024—reveals a loosely synchronised “chorus” of accounts. These range from quasi-news outlets to influencer feeds to meme hubs, and they pick up, adapt, and circulate shared refrains. This distributed amplification produces coherence without direct coordination, making the discourse resilient to disruption across languages and national contexts.
Within this chorus, certain narrative frames recur with striking regularity: the West as morally corrupt and in irreversible decline, Ukraine as illegitimate and Nazi-controlled, and Russia or other counter-hegemonic actors as defenders of sovereignty and traditional values. These are interwoven with longer-standing conspiracist tropes—anti-NATO sentiment, historical revisionism, anti-globalist rhetoric, and claims of humanitarian crisis—allowing new events, whether political developments or battlefield incidents, to be absorbed seamlessly into an ongoing storyline.
Emotional appeal is central: outrage, pride, and resentment are sustained through memes and emoji as rhythmic affective anchors, and through capitalisation as a vernacular mode of urgency. The network’s architecture supports both scale and specialisation, with high-volume hubs generating core content and smaller channels remixing it for subcultural or linguistic niches, preserving thematic fidelity while expanding reach. Certain frames, such as “Ukraine-as-Nazi,” show remarkable persistence, resurfacing with each new incident to maintain continuity.
The “chorus effect” emerges not only in textual repetition but in its temporal rhythm, which we rendered audible by mapping keyword and emoji spikes to sound. The resulting resonant soundscape captures peaks of discourse swelling like refrains, making tangible the communicative logic at play: a decentralised yet synchronised system whose strength lies as much in its affective harmonies and infrastructural tempo as in its propositional content.
This report investigates the dynamics of conspiratorial and geopolitically charged discourse on Telegram, using a longitudinal dataset collected between June 2022 and June 2024. The dataset—comprising 4,082 unique channels and more than 30 million posts—was assembled through a combination of keyword-based seeding and snowball sampling from Telegram’s internal channel-link graph. This method ensured coverage of multiple languages (EN, RU, DE, NL, and others) and channel types, including news-style outlets, influencer accounts, activist groups, meme hubs, and niche communities focused on conspiratorial, extremist, and geopolitical themes.
The initial seed consisted of two Dutch-language channels linked to the populist-right parties Forum for Democracy (Netherlands) and Vlaams Belang (Belgium). From there, we used Telegram’s “recommended channels” feature—a platform-native relational mapping tool—to recursively expand the network to ideologically adjacent spaces. The result is a corpus that spans dozens of languages, national contexts, and thematic preoccupations, allowing for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison of discursive patterns.
From this corpus, multilingual keyword filtering was applied to generate thematic “bins” aligned with dominant discursive currents. Two bins form the focus of this report. The first captures the conspiratorial imaginary, especially contemporary versions of the “one world government” narrative—encompassing globalist elites, climate policy conspiracies, digital identity systems, the World Economic Forum, and the perceived erosion of sovereignty. The second focuses on the Russo-Ukrainian war, tracing how the conflict was narrated, instrumentalised, and mythologised. These domains often overlap, sharing symbolic repertoires and affective intensities that reflect a broader politics of suspicion.