# A Social Media Analysis of Discourse on the Israel--Palestine Conflict on Telegram

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21385/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10200/) (2020)
- [Modeling echo chambers and polarization dynamics in social networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12325/) (2019)
- [Manipulation and abuse on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03752/) (2015)
- [Stanceformer: Target-Aware Transformer for Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07083/) (2024)
- [Israel-Hamas war through Telegram, Reddit and Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00060/) (2025)
- [Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02367/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media has become a central arena in which armed conflicts are contested, yet the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine communities on Telegram, whose broadcast architecture yields an unusually direct record of deliberate political communication, have not been systematically compared at scale. This study presents a multi-method computational analysis of 87,617 messages from sixteen Telegram channels, eight pro-Israel and eight pro-Palestine, spanning May 2021 to June 2026 and covering multiple conflict escalations. It combines sentiment analysis, three stance detection methods drawn from distinct paradigms (keyword matching, zero-shot DeBERTa via natural language inference, and a fine-tuned BERTweet model), and a framing analysis, all evaluated against 736 manually annotated messages. The fine-tuned model performed best (72.1% accuracy, 0.721 macro F1 under 5-fold cross-validation), outperforming both label-free baselines by 8 to 11 points; the baselines stalled in the low-to-mid 60s, indicating a hard ceiling for stance detection not adapted to in-domain language. The central finding emerges only when sentiment, stance, and framing are read together: the two communities deploy the same death- and victim-related vocabulary in opposite emotional registers, pro-Israel channels predominantly neutral and report-style, pro-Palestine channels markedly more negative, consistent with writing from the distinct discourse positions of acting party and affected party.