Towards Understanding the Use of Telegram by Political Groups in Brazil Manoel Júnior manoelrmj@dcc.ufmg.br Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil Philipe Melo philipe@dcc.ufmg.br Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil Ana Paula Couto da Silva ana.coutosilva@dcc.ufmg.br Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil Fabrício Benevenuto fabricio@dcc.ufmg.br Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil Jussara Almeida jussara@dcc.ufmg.br Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil ABSTRACT Instant messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp be- came one of the main means of communication used by people all over the world. In most of these services, communities are cre- ated around the so called groups and channels, allowing easy, en- crypted and instantaneous information exchange. With the polit- ical debate gaining a widespread atention from the public and permeated with intense discussion and polarization, specially in a context in which far right communities are being banned from maistream social networks like Twiter, Youtube, and Facebook, al- ternative platforms, like Telegram become very popular as they start to be seeked as a “free space to discussion” and abused for dissemination of misinformation and hate speech. Tis work con- sists in a data analysis for Brazilian public groups and channels for political discussion on Telegram, observing the network cre- ated in the platform as well as a closer look in the dynamics of messages and members in this platform. Our fndings show that political mobilization increased substantially on Telegram in re- cent years, suggesting a mass migration from other mainstream platforms. We fnd the large groups structure of Telegram are ef- fective in spreading the messages through the network, with the content being viewed by numerous users and forwarded multiple times. Looking at the messages, we fnd an expressive interplay between Telegram and external web pages, notably for Youtube and other social networks. Furthermore, we observed a relevant amount of messages atacking political personalities and spreading unchecked content about COVID-19 pandemic. Taken all together, we perform an extense study in how political discussion advanced on Telegram in Brazil and how they operate in this alternative mes- saging application. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- tion on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permited. To copy other- wise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. WebMedia ’21, November 5–12, 2021, Belo Horizonte / Minas Gerais, Brazil © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8609-8/21/11…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3470482.3479640 CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collab- orative and social computing. KEYWORDS Telegram, content dissemination, politics, messaging applications ACM Reference Format: Manoel Júnior, Philipe Melo, Ana Paula Couto da Silva, Fabrício Benevenuto, and Jussara Almeida. 2021. Towards Understanding the Use of Telegram by Political Groups in Brazil. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia ’21), November 5–12, 2021, Belo Horizonte / Minas Gerais, Brazil. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3470482. 3479640 1 INTRODUÇÃO A popularização dos smartphones e do acesso à Internet impactou diretamente na forma como as pessoas se comunicam. Aplicativos de mensagens instantâneas como WhatsApp e Telegram se torna- ram uma das principais formas de contato com amigos próximos, além de serem plataformas onde é possível encontrar comunidades de pessoas que compartilham interesses em comum através do uso de grupos públicos. Apesar dos diversos benefícios trazidos por esses aplicativos, ca- racterísticas como privacidade das mensagens e a criação de espa- ços para livre discussão podem ser utilizadas, infelizmente, para disseminação de desinformação como parte de campanhas políti- cas [16, 20], conteúdo terrorista [24] e discurso de ódio [3]. Por exemplo, desde as eleições brasileiras de 2018, o WhatsApp tem sido alvo de duras críticas devido aos abusos em seu serviço de mensagens [25]. Em resposta, a empresa já anunciou a exclusão de mais de 100.000 contas 1 e limitou a quantidade de encaminhamen- tos de mensagens. Embora o WhatsApp continue sendo o serviço de mensagens criptografadas mais usado atualmente, o Telegram vem crescendo rapidamente e já ultrapassou os 500 milhões de usuários 2 . Uma parte desse aumento está ligado aos banimentos frequentes de con- tas em redes tradicionais como o Facebook e Youtube, fazendo com 1 htps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-19/whatsapp-bans-more-than- 100-000-accounts-in-brazil-election 2 https://t.me/durov/147 237