Our analysis showed that Telegram became popular with Hong Kong’s political activists in June 2019, when major protests against the Extradition Bill occurred with protesters surrounding the LegCo and blocking the introduction of the legislation. Since then the Hong Kong Telegramsphere was swiftly growing throughout 2019 with the growth peaking in the fall simultaneously with the most active protest period.
Importantly, the citation network on Telegram, fragmented in the beginning, rapidly became cohesive, thus fostering the efficiency of the spread of information. In the case of Hong Kong protests, the increased coherence of the network ensured the efficient diffusion of information among local and city-wide communities. Channels and groups that connected the political community to other communities in the early stage of the network formation might have fostered the increased cohesion. Notably, such broker channels were not particularly influential in the Telegramsphere in terms of their hub and authority scores (they were neither active information spreaders nor frequently cited by other important channels themselves). Still, their role in reaching out to other communities might have been crucial for the subsequent efficient spread of information in the network, suggesting that in the case of Telegram-based protests such “low key” actors can be of high importance. Text analysis results demonstrate that Telegram was used by the protesters mostly to distribute information related to police presence and protest-related actions, as well as for deliberation. Channels and groups with high authority scores were dominated by information on protest-related events. In turn, those with high hub scores that aggregated such information from multiple high-authority sources, were used for discussion of further steps - possibly, based on the information about police presence and other events coming from high-authority sources. Thus, these two types of Telegram channels and groups worked in synergy. The analysis also reveals that the protests were de-facto leaderless, as previously claimed, with different channels switching in terms of the dominance in the network every month. Finally, interrupted time series analysis results show that the National Security Law introduced in July 2020 has triggered a significant decrease in Telegram-based activity.