Mapping Extremist Discourse Communities on Telegram: The Case of the Russian Imperial Movement and Its Affiliates

This paper maps discourse communities created by Russian extremists on Telegram. It assesses the extent to which discourse communities created by extremists identified through qualitative analysis in prior research are still present in a novel Telegram dataset and can be identified through Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and network analysis. It then compares the results of Louvian and Girvan-Newman network community detection methods and the topics assigned to each community to see if the underlying structure of association between topics is robust to the use of different methods for community detection. This work contributes to an understanding of how extremist groups operate online.