Our colleagues from the Baltic Internet Policy Initiative asked an interesting question: How long does news last in Telegram?
Let’s see what they have found.
On May 25, 2025, a material was published on StopFake stating that Polish General Waldemar Skrzypczak did not claim that the West is allegedly preparing a coup in Belarus.
In social networks, on Russian and state Belarusian websites, information was massively disseminated that Poland allegedly announced the “preparation of a coup in Belarus by the West”.
Numerous Telegram channels served as a powerful source of such unreliable publications (disinformation).
Using the Russian service TGStat, we will demonstrate how long the news related to the Polish general circulated in channels and public chats.
By May 31, 2023, there were only 6 mentions with 1261 views.
The largest channels by subscriber count that published about the Polish general’s statement:
What the publication looked like on the “Live Broadcast” channel:
It’s clear that the first sentence contains a manipulation that distorts the meaning of the Polish military’s statement.
Geography of publications:
60% of publications fell on Russian channels and public chats, against only 10% Belarusian ones.
Let’s turn to historical publications, the life cycle of news consists of the following stages.
Birth of information.
Growth, accumulation – an increase in the volume of information and the organization of informational, semantic, navigational links.
Peak period.
Aging – moral aging, loss of relevance, reduction in information volume, loss of connections and representations of information. During this period, temporary reincarnation is possible. When a news story strongly associated with this one enters its peak period.
The final stage – oblivion.
In May 2005, a study was conducted where the leading Hungarian news portal with about 6 million hits per day was chosen as the model for analysis. At the time of the study, about 4 thousand news stories were published there.
By comparing the number of news views with the date of publication, researchers concluded that news on average “lives” for 36 hours.
As we can see, a sufficiently scandalous and distorted publication in Telegram channels lives for about three days.
