Related papers: The Pushshift Telegram Dataset
Instant messaging services are quickly becoming the most dominant form of communication among consumers around the world. Apple iMessage, for example, handles over 2 billion message each day, while WhatsApp claims 16 billion messages from…
In recent years, reports and anecdotal evidence pointing at the role of WhatsApp in a variety of events, ranging from elections to collective violence, have emerged. While academic research should examine the validity of these claims,…
Telegram has grown into a significant platform for news and information sharing, favored for its anonymity and minimal moderation. This openness, however, makes it vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this study, we…
Cyberattacks pose a serious threat to modern sociotechnical systems, often resulting in severe technical and societal consequences. Attackers commonly target systems and infrastructure through methods such as malware, ransomware, or other…
Messaging systems built on mesh networks consisting of smartphones communicating over Bluetooth have been used by protesters around the world after governments have disrupted Internet connectivity. Unfortunately, existing systems have been…
The crime of illegally filming and distributing images or videos worldwide is increasing day by day. With the increasing penetration rate of smartphones, there has been a rise in crimes involving secretly taking pictures of people's bodies…
WhatsApp is a popular messaging app used by over a billion users around the globe. Due to this popularity, understanding misbehavior on WhatsApp is an important issue. The sending of unwanted junk messages by unknown contacts via WhatsApp…
Social media plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication. A vast amount of this occurs in code-mixed and multilingual form, posing a significant challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for processing such…
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news…
The growing awareness that human communications and social interactions are assuming a stratified structure, due to the availability of multiple techno-communication channels, including online social networks, mobile phone calls, short…
Mobile messaging scams--fraudulent messages delivered over SMS and other mobile applications--have become a persistent and evolving security threat, yet the attributes underlying these campaigns remain unclear. This study seeks to address…
Instant messaging with texts and stickers has become a widely adopted communication medium, enabling efficient expression of user semantics and emotions. With the increased use of stickers conveying information and feelings, sticker…
Connectivity and message propagation are central, yet often underutilized, sources of information in misinformation detection -- especially on poorly moderated platforms such as Telegram, which has become a critical channel for…
We present the first large-scale analysis of 339 cybercriminal activity channels (CACs). Followed by over 23.8 million users, these channels share a wide array of malicious and unethical content with their subscribers, including compromised…
Riots and protests, if gone out of control, can cause havoc in a country. We have seen examples of this, such as the BLM movement, climate strikes, CAA Movement, and many more, which caused disruption to a large extent. Our motive behind…
Short-video platforms show an increasing impact on people's daily lives nowadays, with billions of active users spending plenty of time each day. The interactions between users and online platforms give rise to many scientific problems…
In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we…
The Internet has become a fundamental resource for activism as it facilitates political mobilization at a global scale. Petition platforms are a clear example of how thousands of people around the world can contribute to social change.…
Telegram has emerged as a major platform for large-scale video piracy, where copyrighted content is rapidly distributed among users. Despite its prominence, the structural and operational dynamics of this ecosystem remain insufficiently…
Online communities of known extremist groups like the alt-right and QAnon have been well explored in past work. However, we find that an extremist group called Sovereign Citizens is relatively unexplored despite its existence since the…