{"ID":5937129,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-07T03:14:33.014478982Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-09T11:35:53.955421491Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04962","arxiv_id":"2607.04962","title":"Who's Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts","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 that drive such narratives. We develop annotation guidelines for conspiratorial actors, present a span-annotated corpus of German Telegram posts, and investigate their automatic extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the \\textit{Schwurbelarchiv}, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated with meaningful agreement and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.","short_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 that drive such narratives. We develop annotation guidelines...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04962","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.04962v1","authors":"[\"Helena Mihaljević\",\"Jolanda Beer\",\"Mareike Lisker\",\"Katharina Soemer\"]","published":"2026-07-06T11:49:32Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Transformer\"]","has_code":false}