Telegram lacks a comprehensive search functionality that most social media platforms have. This makes it difficult to know what kind of content is shared on the platform and what channels are influential.
tg.observer makes public channels and groups on Telegram searchable. Our aim is to be transparent about the sampling process and to publish enough information to facilitate scholarly and investigative work.
We are working to publish the following:
- Metadata about public groups and channels on Telegram and sampling process
- A graph of connections between channels
- Tools for helping you select sample of channels and assess sampling results.
The tool is intended to complement existing tools for studying Telegram. Once you have discovered channels of interest, you can use other tools to follow them or export their content.
We are making use of TGDataset as an initial dataset. This will be extended by our own data collection.
A public prototype of the tool is available at https://tg.observer.
The site is created by Aleksi Knuutila from the University of Helsinki, and colleagues from the Department for Sociology.