Graph-Based Detection of Disinformation Narrative Diffusion between Russian and Ukrainian Telegram Channels

Yuliia Vistak, Viktoriia Makovska, Vera Schmitt, Veronika Solopova


Abstract
Detecting disinformation narratives on social media is challenging due to the scale of amplification, rapid evolution, and linguistic variability of online content. We propose a graph-based framework for identifying and analyzing disinformation narratives in Telegram ecosystems by combining weak supervision with propagation graph analysis. The approach aggregates semantically related claims into narrative-level clusters and models their diffusion across interconnected channels. This enables the detection of coordinated narrative amplification that is difficult to capture through post-level analysis alone. Our results demonstrate that integrating textual signals with network structure provides a scalable method for detecting disinformation narratives and offers insights into how they propagate within large-scale messaging environments.
Anthology ID:
2026.unlp-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Conference (UNLP 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Lviv, Ukraine
Editor:
Mariana Romanyshyn
Venue:
UNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
80–96
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.unlp-1.9/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuliia Vistak, Viktoriia Makovska, Vera Schmitt, and Veronika Solopova. 2026. Graph-Based Detection of Disinformation Narrative Diffusion between Russian and Ukrainian Telegram Channels. In Proceedings of the Fifth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Conference (UNLP 2026), pages 80–96, Lviv, Ukraine. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Graph-Based Detection of Disinformation Narrative Diffusion between Russian and Ukrainian Telegram Channels (Vistak et al., UNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.unlp-1.9.pdf