Tracing Cross-Platform Video Circulation: YouTube Links in Political Telegram Chats During the 2024 U.S. Election
Resumo
Public Telegram chats have become relevant spaces for political communication and cross-platform information circulation. In this work, we analyze how YouTube videos were redistributed through Telegram during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Starting from a large-scale dataset of public Telegram messages, we built a link-centric pipeline to extract and normalize YouTube URLs, enrich videos with public metadata, organize them into macro-topics, estimate toxicity, and measure diffusion patterns. The final corpus contains 686,625 English-language videos. Our results show that politically oriented Telegram chats circulate a heterogeneous set of videos, including both political and non-political content. Political macro-topics, especially War and Crime, Security and Justice, present higher toxicity distributions, but toxicity is not simply proportional to content volume or reach. Diffusion is highly asymmetric: most videos appear only once, while reposted political videos tend to circulate in shorter and more intense episodes, often aligned with high-salience events. These findings suggest that the amplification of YouTube videos on Telegram is shaped by topic and temporality, rather than by toxicity alone.
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