TGDataset: Collecting and Exploring the Largest Telegram Channels Dataset

Telegram is a widely adopted instant messaging platform. It has become worldwide popular because of its emphasis on privacy and its social network features such as channels-virtual rooms in which only the admins can post and broadcast messages to all the subscribers. Channels are used to deliver live updates (e.g., weather alerts) and content to a large audience (e.g., COVID-19 announcements) but unfortunately also to disseminate radical ideologies and coordinate attacks such as the Capitol Hill riot. This paper introduces the TGDataset, the most extensive publicly available collection of Telegram channels, comprising 120,979 channels and over 400 million messages. We outline the data collection process and provide a comprehensive overview of the data set. Using language detection, we identify the predominant languages within the dataset. We then focus on English channels, employing topic modeling to analyze the subjects they cover. Finally, we discuss some use cases in which our dataset can be instrumental in understanding the Telegram ecosystem and studying the diffusion of questionable news. Alongside the raw dataset, we release the scripts used in our analysis, as well as a list of channels associated with a novel conspiracy theory known as Sabmyk.