This study aims to examine how drug-market activity on Telegram is organised through digitally mediated but physically grounded practices, and how volatility and partial visibility shape what can be known about these markets.
The work uses an iterative, three-level link-tracing scrape of public Telegram channels anchored in city-specific entry points (London/UK and Warsaw/Poland) and conducted in two waves (March and May, 2024) capturing channel metadata and messages from public channels, and recording private channels encountered via links. This is the basis for a descriptive analysis of channel network and activity, and a closer description of two sales bots.
Across both entry points, a sizeable, heterogeneous market is observed, but one that is difficult to bound because discovery is highly dependent on a small number of “hub” channels. The network contracted sharply between March and May, especially in London, indicating high churn and the fragility of entry pathways. Private channels comprised a substantial share of the networks. Channel descriptions combined drug advertising with trust/security signalling and, in Warsaw, frequent “roleplay” disclaimers suggestive of platform-facing self-protection. Evidence of cross-platform linking and bot-mediated storefronts indicates hybrid infrastructures with physical fulfilment.
This study characterise Telegram’s drug-market network as marked by churn and with volatile key nodes, documenting linkages that blur digital/physical boundaries. It shows how small, short-lived channels coexist with a few high-visibility hubs and bots, and links these patterns to the dynamics of hybridity, volatility and partial visibility: factors that complicate both inference and intervention in app-mediated drug markets.
