Who's Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts

Title:Who's Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts

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 that drive such narratives. We develop annotation guidelines for conspiratorial actors, present a span-annotated corpus of German Telegram posts, and investigate their automatic extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the \textit{Schwurbelarchiv}, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated with meaningful agreement and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.04962 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.04962v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.04962 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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