Coordinated Information Dissemination on Telegram and Reddit During Political Turbulence: A Case Study of Venezuela in Global News Channels
Despoina Antonakaki, Sotiris Ioannidis

TL;DR
This study investigates whether major international news outlets coordinate their reporting on Venezuela during political upheaval by analyzing Telegram and Reddit data, finding mostly heterogeneous coverage with limited evidence of coordination.
Contribution
It introduces a novel framework combining temporal co-posting and text similarity to detect coordination, revealing that mainstream news channels tend to produce diverse content during crises.
Findings
No significant near-duplicate coordination detected.
Temporal asymmetries suggest heterogeneous editorial responses.
Attention spikes occur without text reuse, indicating synchronized focus.
Abstract
Telegram is increasingly used for political communication and news dissemination, yet evidence of coordinated content sharing remains limited. We test whether mainstream global news channels coordinate when reporting on Venezuela during political turbulence. We analyze public Telegram posts from nine major international outlets (2017--2026; 2,038 Venezuela-related messages) and define coordination as temporal co-posting (hourly/daily windows) plus near-duplicate text similarity using character -gram TF--IDF cosine similarity. Similarity scores concentrate at low values and no cross-channel near-duplicate pairs are detected at . A falsification test that randomizes timestamps within channels produces the same null result, indicating the pipeline does not create spurious coordination. Event-focused diagnostics show temporal lead--lag asymmetries consistent with…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Media Influence and Politics · Media Studies and Communication
