Jolanda Beer
Author directory2026
Who’s Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts
Helena Mihaljevic | Jolanda Beer | Mareike Lisker | Katharina Soemer
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Helena Mihaljevic | Jolanda Beer | Mareike Lisker | Katharina Soemer
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
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.