“If you want to buy my books and my t-shirt store,” says the description of the Noticias Rafapal channel, which is defined as “journalism for cosmic minds,” and which is aimed at its 125,000 subscribers on Telegram. Her latest self-proclaimed “news” says that “everything indicates that Begoña Gómez is the front man of her husband, President Sánchez, in a corruption plot with the Moroccan government” or that the Pegasus spy software, of Israeli origin, would allow the government of Netanyahu “having privileged information to overthrow the Sánchez government” for recognizing the Palestinian State.
Another channel, La Quinta Columna TV, calling itself an “alternative information channel,” asks for donations in another way: “If you wish to contribute by helping financially with the research, study and development work of La Quinta Columna, we will provide you with our bank account number.” . His latest articles are about graphene in vaccines, news of several deaths of all ages (including OJ Simpson) that tendentiously suggest that the cause is the covid vaccine and other alternative variants to the official versions.
Despite this need for alternative or uncensored information, payment options to collaborate are very common: a transfer to an account at Banco Santander, a bizum to a mobile phone or an online payment through the well-known Stripe and PayPal platforms. With almost 200,000 followers, La Quinta Columna is the most influential Spanish-language conspiracy channel, according to a new scientific article titled The Conspiracy Money Machine, published by five researchers from the Italian Sapienza University (Rome), which focuses on the business model of the main Telegram conspiracy channels. Although the majority of these channels tend to add to what is happening currently, the global focus of this study means that some channels more focused on national conspiracies, the so-called “fachosphere”, do not appear as main ones.
Telegram is a messaging application that barely moderates its content or collaborates with national authorities. On March 22, the Spanish National Court was about to limit access to Telegram throughout the country due to a case of copyright violation, but the information circulating on the platform could be much worse: terrorism, pedophilia or racism. Although, as in all applications with millions of users, the majority use it to send messages or normal content.
It is difficult to find out if economic motivation is the main or only cause for promoting conspiracy theories that can attract the attention of thousands of citizens. “The motives of those who spread disinformation can be many and depend on the actor and their topic,” says Ana Romero, researcher at the organization EU DisinfoLab. “In climate disinformation there are almost always corporate interests that go hand in hand with politicians, for example. Others are interested only in financial returns and although it is likely that to some extent they believe what they say, I believe that they have become directors and actors in their own film and in many cases they lose the ability to know how to separate reality from fiction,” he adds. Rosemary.
The Italian researchers intended in their article to analyze a conspiracy theory called Sabmyk, an evolution of QAnon that promotes a messianic figure with that name, with more than a million followers spread across more than 100 channels: “Originally, the article was about the Sabmyk community. We wanted to understand what other conspiracy theories had been born on Telegram. We didn’t think we would find money in these channels,” says Alessandro Mei, one of the authors.
But they found enough money and the focus changed. The work focused on three ways to “actively seek to profit from their subscribers,” the article says: affiliate programs [cobrar una comisión por poner enlaces a páginas de compraventa como Amazon o eBay]donations and campaigns crowdfunding. The only one that can be quantified from the outside are those campaigns on platforms such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe: “The amount of money achieved by projects promoted by conspiratorial channels is 84.7 million euros, from more than 985,000 contributors,” the article details.
“Disinformation is very lucrative and it is a business that also has multiple ways to finance itself,” says Romero. “It is not new and whenever I see economic claims I think that they use a kind of ideological loyalty programs. The donor user gives a “voluntary fee” and the beneficiary of the same makes him a supporter of a cause,” he adds.
How channels are identified
To identify the channels, researchers have searched for links or resources on YouTube, Reddit, 4chan and other pages that other studies had characterized as conspiratorial. Then, in a public database of 120,000 Telegram channels, they looked at which ones shared these resources and have links to each other. They then divided the findings into four mainly linguistic communities: English, German, Neo-Latin and the so-called “sabmyk”. Between them there are 17,144 channels, of which 8,015 are in English, 4,854 in German and 1,328 in Spanish. The most influential channel is Disclose.tv. Researchers have ordered the most important channels by their ability to influence each community, not by the number of subscribers.
In Spanish, the most influential is La Quinta Columna, followed by Rafapal, El Investigador, Covid-1984 and Despertador de la Matrix. Each one follows their particular strategy to finance themselves. For example, in the case of Rafapal, according to Massimo La Morgia, another co-author, “you can already see opening the description of his Telegram profile a link to buy his book and a link to a market where t-shirts are sold, I think designed by him or to support him. In favor of Rafapal we can say that he does not seem to monetize in Rumble [una plataforma de vídeos alternativa a YouTube] through donations.”
“In total, the campaigns crowdfunding promoted on Spanish channels, from which we have been able to obtain data, they raised a total of 1.6 million euros,” says Vincenzo Imperati, also co-author. Some of these projects are The Voice of César Vidal —a podcast by a Spanish announcer—, a medical-legal congress or The Big Reset —The great reset, in English—, a documentary about the pandemic. Only 245 channels in Spanish promote this type of campaigns, led by The calm before the storm and Doctors for the truth Mexico. These projects and these figures are only part of the money these channels bring in. EL PAÍS has contacted three of these channels to find out their version, but has not received a response.
There are more channels in Spanish that try with donations: 493 have shared 362 unique links to pages like Patreon or PayPal. The most prolific channels are BLesNoticias, TierraPura.org (although their Patreon is now deleted) and Despierta Goyim. Affiliate marketing or e-commerce platform links are the least used resource by pages in Spanish. Only 95 channels have ever used them, especially Amazon. “Amazon presents standard products such as books, masks and water filters, while on eBay, Etsy or Teespring we find a range of questionable products (5G shields, stone protectors against electromagnetic fields or healing wands). The distinction between platforms would be attributed to the different content policies of these platforms. “Amazon maintains a more rigorous content policy,” the article says.
Other sources of financing
Researchers have also found other types of funding sources apart from the three main ones. Telegram has just introduced its own ads, the revenue from which it shares with the channel creators. There are also external platforms like Telega.io that allow advertisers to coordinate with channel managers; Another method is to send visits to your own videos on YouTube, where advertising revenue is also shared between the creator and the platform. The researchers have also found a handful of cryptocurrency addresses, they have verified the income in all of them and they add up to about 20,700 euros.
Traffic to own pages is the last method found: “We have noticed that there are many channels that promote websites that contain buying and selling pages or a channel’s own page. On these sites we have seen that there is usually an address dedicated to donations. Over there [fuera de Telegram] there are links to donation platforms that we have analyzed, IBAN and addresses blockchain to send donations to,” says co-author Francesco Sassi.