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

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 $n$-gram TF--IDF cosine similarity. Similarity scores concentrate at low values and no cross-channel near-duplicate pairs are detected at $τ=0.85$. 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 heterogeneous editorial responsiveness, and narrative clustering during the January 3--6, 2026 peak reveals moderate framing diversity without separable narrative blocs. An Attention--Coordination Ratio formalizes sharp attention spikes in early January 2026 despite absent near-duplicate coordination, distinguishing synchronized attention from coordinated text reuse. We also collect an auxiliary Reddit dataset to contextualize public attention; however, cross-community coordination is not estimable due to structural sparsity (no comparable multi-subreddit daily buckets). Overall, even under major geopolitical shocks, mainstream Telegram news coverage is heterogeneous rather than near-duplicate coordinated.

Figures (20)

• Figure 1: Relative contribution of Venezuela-related messages per Telegram channel.
• Figure 2: Number of temporal buckets containing content from at least two distinct sources, enabling cross-source coordination analysis. Telegram exhibits numerous comparable buckets, whereas Reddit exhibits none due to structural sparsity and asynchronous posting.
• Figure 3: Daily volume of Venezuela-related messages across the monitored Telegram channels.
• Figure 4: CDF of Venezuela-related message counts per channel, highlighting a highly skewed distribution.
• Figure 5: Daily Reddit activity related to Venezuela across multiple subreddits. The figure shows the number of items (submissions and comments) per day for Venezuela-focused subreddits and for r/worldnews restricted to Venezuela-related posts. While Venezuela-specific communities exhibit relatively low and stable activity, r/worldnews displays pronounced, short-lived spikes corresponding to major geopolitical events that generate large discussion threads. These peaks reflect event-driven public attention rather than coordinated content dissemination.