Unveiling the dynamics of discussions in public Telegram groups: a study on the 2022 Brazilian elections
Abstract
This study presents a new methodology to analyze the dynamics of discussions in online groups, as well as its application to investigate the dynamics of political discourse in Brazilian public groups on Telegram during the 2022 presidential election. Our methodology involves the use of: (1) a large language model (LLM) to summarize the messages shared in a group during a time interval; (2) embeddings to represent the summaries; and (3) an unsupervised learning algorithm to cluster the representations, thus identifying large themes of discussion. The discussion themes are then characterized around the main topics and terms that make up the discussions, and the temporal evolution of the groups around each theme is analyzed. Our results reveal the main contents of the discussions and how they evolve over time and in response to political events and happenings, such as January 8, highlighting how social networks can influence the formation of political discourse in society.References
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Wich, M., Gorniak, A., Eder, T., Bartmann, D., Çakici, B. E., and Groh, G. (2022). Introducing an abusive language classification framework for telegram to investigate the german hater community. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Xu, J. and Livshits, B. (2019). The anatomy of a cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump scheme. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19).
Yitzhaki, S. (1979). Relative deprivation and the gini coefficient. The quarterly journal of economics, pages 321–324.
Anglano, C., Canonico, M., and Guazzone, M. (2017). Forensic analysis of telegram messenger on android smartphones. Digital Investigation, 23:31–49.
Araujo, M. M., Ferreira, C. H., Reis, J. C., Silva, A. P., and Almeida, J. M. (2023). Identificação e caracterização de campanhas de propagandas eleitorais antecipadas brasileiras no twitter. In Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining (BrasNAM), pages 67–78. SBC.
Bär, D., Pröllochs, N., and Feuerriegel, S. (2023). New threats to society from free-speech social media platforms. Communications of the ACM, 66(10):37–40.
Bovet, A. and Grindrod, P. (2022). Organization and evolution of the uk far-right network on telegram. Applied Network Science.
Boyd, R. L., Ashokkumar, A., Seraj, S., and Pennebaker, J. W. (2022). The development and psychometric properties of liwc-22. Technical report, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
Chagas, V. (2022). Whatsapp and digital astroturfing: A social network analysis of brazilian political discussion groups of bolsonaro’s supporters. In International Journal of Communication.
Collell, G. and Moens, M.-F. (2021). How do simple transformations of text and image features impact cosine-based semantic match? In Hiemstra, D., Moens, M.-F., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., and Sebastiani, F., editors, Advances in Information Retrieval.
Ferreira, C. H. G., Murai, F., Silva, A. P. C., Almeida, J. M., Trevisan, M., Vassio, L., Mellia, M., and Drago, I. (2021). On the dynamics of political discussions on instagram: A network perspective. Online Social Networks and Media, 25.
G. Da Fonseca, L. G., Gomes Ferreira, C. H., and Soares Dos Reis, J. C. (2024). The role of news source certification in shaping tweet content: Textual and dissemination patterns in brazil’s 2022 elections. In Proceedings of the 20th Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems, pages 1–10.
Grootendorst, M. (2022). Bertopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based tf-idf procedure. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.05794.
Guimarães, S., Silva, M., Caetano, J., Araújo, M., Santos, J., Reis, J. C. S., Silva, A. P. C., Benevenuto, F., and Almeida, J. M. (2022). Análise de propagandas eleitorais antecipadas no twitter. Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining.
Hoseini, M., de Freitas Melo, P., Benevenuto, F., Feldmann, A., and Zannettou, S. (2024). Characterizing information propagation in fringe communities on telegram. In International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Júnior, M., Melo, P., Kansaon, D., Mafra, V., Sá, K., and Benevenuto, F. (2022). Telegram monitor: Monitoring brazilian political groups and channels on telegram. arXiv:2202.04737 [cs.SI].
Kloo, I., Cruickshank, I. J., and Carley, K. M. (2024). A cross-platform topic analysis of the nazi narrative on twitter and telegram during the 2022 russian invasion of ukraine. In International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Malagoli, L., Piorino, G., Ferreira, C. H., and da Silva, A. P. C. (2024). Twitter and the 2022 brazilian elections portrait: A network and content-driven analysis. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia), pages 283–291. SBC.
Malagoli, L., Stancioli, J., Ferreira, C. H., Vasconcelos, M., da Silva, A. P. C., and Almeida, J. (2021). Caracterizaçao do debate no twitter sobre a vacinaçao contra a covid-19 no brasil. In Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining (BraSNAM), pages 55–66. SBC.
Maros, A., Almeida, J. M., Benevenuto, F., and Vasconcelos, M. (2020). Analyzing the use of audio messages in whatsapp groups. Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020.
McInnes, L., Healy, J., Saul, N., and Großberger, L. (2018). Umap: Uniform manifold approximation and projection. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(29):861.
Mining, W. I. D. (2006). Data mining: Concepts and techniques. Morgan Kaufinann.
Naseri, M. and Zamani, H. (2019). Analyzing and predicting news popularity in an instant messaging service. In International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.
Nikkhah, S., Miller, A. D., and Young, A. L. (2018). Telegram as an immigration management tool. In Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pages 345–348.
Nobre, G., G. Ferreira, C., and Almeida, J. (2020). Beyond groups: Uncovering dynamic communities on the whatsapp network of information dissemination. In International Conference on Social Informatics.
Nobre, G. P., Ferreira, C. H., and Almeida, J. M. (2022). A hierarchical network-oriented analysis of user participation in misinformation spread on whatsapp. Information Processing & Management.
Paoletti, G., Almeida, J. M., Vassio, L., Gonçalves, M. A., and Mellia, M. (2025). Join the chat: How curiosity sparks participation in telegram groups. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Perlo, A., Paoletti, G., Jha, N., Vassio, L., Almeida, J., and Mellia, M. (2025). A topic-wise exploration of the telegram group-verse. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Pinto, S. L., Campolina, J. J., Sena, J. P. M., Félix, G., Ferreira, L. N., and Reis, J. C. S. (2024). Caracterização e predição de usuários tóxicos no twitter/x durante as eleições brasileiras de 2022. Brazilian Workshop on Social Network ANalysis and Mining.
Pires, R., Abonizio, H., Almeida, T. S., and Nogueira, R. (2023). Sabiá: Portuguese large language models. In Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems.
Resende, G., CS Reis, J., Vasconcelos, M., Almeida, J. M., and Benevenuto, F. (2019). Analyzing textual (mis) information shared in whatsapp groups. In ACM conference on web science.
Sarmento, M. and de Oliveira, H. (2024). Sumarização automática de artigos de notícias em português: Da extração à abstração com abordagens clássicas e modelos de neurais. In Anais do XV Simpósio Brasileiro de Tecnologia da Informação e da Linguagem Humana.
Souza, F., Nogueira, R., and Lotufo, R. (2020). Bertimbau: pretrained bert models for brazilian portuguese. In Brazilian conference on intelligent systems, pages 403–417. Springer.
Thorgren, E., Mohammadinodooshan, A., and Carlsson, N. (2024). Temporal dynamics of user engagement on instagram. In ACM Web Science Conference.
Venâncio, O. R., Ferreira, C. H., Almeida, J. M., and da Silva, A. P. C. (2024a). Unraveling user coordination on telegram: A comprehensive analysis of political mobilization during the 2022 brazilian presidential election. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, volume 18, pages 1545–1556.
Venâncio, O. R., Gonçalves, G. H. S., Ferreira, C. H. G., and da Silva, A. P. C. (2024b). Evidências de disseminação de conteúdo no telegram durante o ataque aos órgãos públicos brasileiros em 2023. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web.
Wich, M., Gorniak, A., Eder, T., Bartmann, D., Çakici, B. E., and Groh, G. (2022). Introducing an abusive language classification framework for telegram to investigate the german hater community. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Xu, J. and Livshits, B. (2019). The anatomy of a cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump scheme. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19).
Yitzhaki, S. (1979). Relative deprivation and the gini coefficient. The quarterly journal of economics, pages 321–324.
Published
2025-07-20
How to Cite
JUNQUEIRA, Daniel N.; FERREIRA, Carlos H. G.; PAOLETTI, Giordano; ALMEIDA, Jussara M..
Unveiling the dynamics of discussions in public Telegram groups: a study on the 2022 Brazilian elections. In: BRAZILIAN WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND MINING (BRASNAM), 14. , 2025, Maceió/AL.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 255-268.
ISSN 2595-6094.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/brasnam.2025.9250.
