A Telegram Corpus for Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Online Harm
Veronika Solopova, Tatjana Scheffler, Mihaela Popa‐Wyatt · Journal of Open Humanities Data · 2021
We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of Donald Trump supporters, covering a large part of his presidency, from late 2016 until January 2021, including the January 6 Capitol riot. The discussion among the group members, over this long time period, includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of harmful speech. To enable research into the role of harmful speech in political discourse, we added two types of annotations to the corpus: (i) automatic annotations of offensive language for all messages, and (ii) our own manual annotations of harmful language for a portion of the posts leading up to the January 2021 Capitol riot and its aftermath.