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

arXiv:2607.04962 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-07-06 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-07-06

Updated: 2026-09-21

Comments: Accepted to the 6th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2026)

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors.

Terminology

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 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.

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