Characterizing the Dynamics of Conspiracy-Related German Telegram Conversations during COVID-19
Joao Pinheiro Neto
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We provide a temporal and network analysis of the structure of conspiracy-related German-language Telegram chats in a novel large-scale dataset, which captures a significant proportion of COVID-19-era conspiracy discourse in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A prelimin