Amplifying the regime: identifying coordinated activity of pro-government Telegram channels in Russia and Belarus

Summary

This paper examines how pro-government Telegram channels in Russia and Belarus coordinate to amplify regime-aligned narratives. Treating Telegram as a critical but understudied venue for political communication in post-Soviet authoritarian contexts, Kuznetsova uses network analysis of message-forwarding patterns to show that these channels do not operate independently but cluster into identifiable coordination structures. The argument is that Telegram’s forwarding affordance is actively leveraged by regime-aligned actors as infrastructure for narrative amplification, making coordinated behavior a constitutive feature of authoritarian information ecosystems on the platform.

Key Contributions

• Empirical evidence of coordinated pro-government activity on Telegram, a platform underrepresented in coordination research relative to Western mainstream social media.
• Extension of the coordinated (inauthentic) behavior research agenda into authoritarian information environments.
• Comparative angle that brings Russian and Belarusian regime-aligned ecosystems into a single analytic frame.

Methods

• Collection of messages from pro-government Telegram channels in Russia and Belarus.
• Network-analytic identification of coordination via shared message-forwarding patterns, surfacing clusters of channels that systematically amplify one another.

Findings

• Pro-government channels form distinct clusters whose forwarding behavior is consistent with coordination rather than organic overlap.
• These clusters function as amplification structures for regime-aligned narratives.
• Similar coordination logics are observable across both Russian and Belarusian channel ecosystems, suggesting a shared playbook within the broader authoritarian information space.

Connections

This work sits alongside other recent efforts to detect coordination through content-sharing and amplification signals — methodologically resonant with Graham2026-fb, Graham2025-gp, and Minici2024-tf — and contributes a state-aligned, authoritarian case to a literature that has often centered Western or commercial influence operations such as those analyzed in Luceri2025-tr and Gerard2025-br. Its focus on Telegram as a coordination venue complements platform-diversifying work like Kansaon2025-id and the regime/state-actor analyses in Di-Marco2025-aa and FitzGerald2025-nv.