Who’s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors.While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors portrayed as responsible in such narratives.We develop detailed guidelines for the span-level annotation of conspiratorial actors and use them to create a corpus of German Telegram posts, before investigating automatic actor extraction using transformer-based models.We further apply the resulting model to the Schwurbelarchiv, a large-scale archive of German conspiracyrelated Telegram channels.Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated consistently and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7167596490