January 2019 - September 2020

Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese - one of the low-resource Asian languages, - as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders - those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, - such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.

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.