Telegram group quality measurement by user behavior analysis

• Published in: Social network analysis and mining Vol. 9; no. 1; p. 33
• Main Authors: Hashemi, Ali, Zare Chahooki, Mohammad Ali
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vienna Springer Vienna 01.12.2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Applications of Graph Theory and Complex Networks; Applied behavior analysis; Bans; Censorship; Channels; Computer Science; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Economics; Game Theory; Humanities; Hypotheses; Law; Marketing; Measurement; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Original Article; Popularity; Quality assessment; Search engines; Social and Behav. Sciences; Social networks; Statistics for Social Sciences; User behavior; Iran
• ISSN: 1869-5450; 1869-5469
• DOI: 10.1007/s13278-019-0575-9

Telegram is a cloud-based instant messenger with more than 200 million monthly active users. The new features introduced in Telegram such as channels, bots, supergroups, and advanced sharing mechanisms have risen up the instant messenger to a higher level. Telegram is now a new paradigm between social networks and instant messengers. Telegram is very popular and growing rapidly in many countries such as Iran, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia. The importance and popularity of Telegram are even more highlighted by the fact that after censorship in Iran and Russia, users did not start using other messaging apps, but instead turned to VPN services to circumvent the block, rendering the censorship ineffective. A detailed analysis of Iranian users’ behavior in Telegram is shown in this research for the first time. The analysis and statistics may help interested parties in comprehending a deeper insight into Telegram users’ behavior. More than 900,000 Persian channels and 300,000 Persian supergroups have been discovered, crawled and inspected in this study. Based on our explorations, we devised a noble method to measure group qualities in Telegram. Group quality measurement is accomplished by several features we have extracted and studied in this paper.