🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the bidirectional information flow between major Russian state-aligned media outlets (e.g., RT, Sputnik) and 732 Telegram channels—a departure from the conventional unidirectional “media-to-platform” transmission model.
Method: Leveraging full-text corpora from 16 Russian news websites and corresponding Telegram content, we employ MPNet-based semantic encoding, DP-Means clustering, and Hawkes process modeling to quantify narrative diffusion and origin attribution.
Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence of deep narrative co-construction: 2.3%–26.7% of Russian media reports are directly sourced from Telegram curation. The outlet ura.news and the channel @genshab emerge as the most influential diffusion hubs within the Russian-language information ecosystem. Our framework quantifies dynamic role differentiation across actors in narrative dominance and propagation efficiency, challenging the assumption of top-down media control. The findings offer novel empirical evidence and a methodological blueprint for analyzing hybrid media ecologies under authoritarian conditions.
📝 Abstract
In response to disinformation and propaganda from Russian online media following the invasion of Ukraine, Russian media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik News were banned throughout Europe. To maintain viewership, many of these Russian outlets began to heavily promote their content on messaging services like Telegram. In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. Leveraging the foundational model MPNet, DP-Means clustering, and Hawkes processes, we trace how narratives spread between news sites and Telegram channels. We show that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram but that they source material from the messaging platform. For example, across the websites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of articles discussed content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram. Finally, tracking the spread of individual topics, we measure the rate at which news outlets and Telegram channels disseminate content within the Russian media ecosystem, finding that websites like ura.news and Telegram channels such as @genshab are the most effective at disseminating their content.
