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

Abstract

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.