Malicious creativity in Telegram’s (software) anti-vaccination ecosystem: profiling actors and early misinformation dynamics

Abstract

This study examines methodological challenges in collecting and analysing misinformation on Telegram (software) and develops a platform-sensitive conceptual framework for identifying malicious actors. Addressing gaps in existing research, the framework accounts for Telegram’s distinctive features, including limited moderation, privacy affordances, and channel-based dissemination. The study combines a structured literature review with the development and empirical testing of a four-dimensional framework encompassing creators, message content, target victims, and social context. The framework is applied to the anti-vaccination ecosystem on Telegram using a dataset of 7550 messages collected from 151 public channels and manually annotated. The results demonstrate both the analytical value of structured content-based approaches and their limitations in attributing malicious activity without behavioural and network-level data.