@inproceedings{mihaljevic-etal-2026-whos,
title = "Who{'}s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from {G}erman Telegram Posts",
author = "Mihaljevic, Helena and
Beer, Jolanda and
Lisker, Mareike and
Soemer, Katharina",
editor = "Calabrese, Agostina and
Davidson, Thomas and
de Kock, Christine and
Khurana, Urja and
Marchiori Manerba, Marta and
Piot, Paloma and
Talat, Zeerak",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms ({WOAH})",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.22/",
pages = "249--260",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-487-3",
abstract = "Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors. While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors portrayed as responsible in such narratives. We develop detailed guidelines for the span-level annotation of conspiratorial actors and use them to create a corpus of German Telegram posts, before investigating automatic actor extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the Schwurbelarchiv, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated consistently and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="mihaljevic-etal-2026-whos">
<titleInfo>
<title>Who’s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Helena</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mihaljevic</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jolanda</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Beer</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mareike</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lisker</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Katharina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Soemer</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Agostina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Calabrese</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Thomas</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Davidson</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Christine</namePart>
<namePart type="family">de Kock</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Urja</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Khurana</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Marta</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Marchiori Manerba</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Paloma</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Piot</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zeerak</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Talat</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-487-3</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors. While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors portrayed as responsible in such narratives. We develop detailed guidelines for the span-level annotation of conspiratorial actors and use them to create a corpus of German Telegram posts, before investigating automatic actor extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the Schwurbelarchiv, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated consistently and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">mihaljevic-etal-2026-whos</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.22/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>249</start>
<end>260</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Who’s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts
%A Mihaljevic, Helena
%A Beer, Jolanda
%A Lisker, Mareike
%A Soemer, Katharina
%Y Calabrese, Agostina
%Y Davidson, Thomas
%Y de Kock, Christine
%Y Khurana, Urja
%Y Marchiori Manerba, Marta
%Y Piot, Paloma
%Y Talat, Zeerak
%S Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-487-3
%F mihaljevic-etal-2026-whos
%X Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors. While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors portrayed as responsible in such narratives. We develop detailed guidelines for the span-level annotation of conspiratorial actors and use them to create a corpus of German Telegram posts, before investigating automatic actor extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the Schwurbelarchiv, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated consistently and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.22/
%P 249-260
Markdown (Informal)
[Who’s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts](https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.22/) (Mihaljevic et al., WOAH 2026)
ACL