TeleScope: A Longitudinal Dataset for Investigating Online Discourse and Information Interaction on Telegram

Telegram is a globally popular instant messaging platform known for its strong emphasis on security, privacy, and unique social networking features. It has recently emerged as the host for various cross-domain analysis and research works, such as social media influence, propaganda studies, and extremism. This paper introduces TeleScope, an extensive dataset suite that, to our knowledge, is the largest of its kind. It comprises metadata for about 500K Telegram channels and downloaded message metadata for about 71K public channels, accounting for around 120M crawled messages. We also release channel connections and user interaction data built using Telegram's message-forwarding feature to study multiple use cases, such as information spread and message forwarding patterns. In addition, we provide data enrichments, such as language detection, active message posting periods for each channel, and Telegram entities extracted from messages, that enable online discourse analysis beyond what is possible with the original data alone. The dataset is designed for diverse applications, independent of specific research objectives, and sufficiently versatile to facilitate the replication of social media studies comparable to those conducted on platforms like X (formerly Twitter)