Annett Heft and Kilian Buehling of the research group "Dynamics of Digital Mobilization" at the Weizenbaum Institute and Freie Universität Berlin, along with their co-authors Pablo Jost (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), Maximilian Zehring, Hendrik Bitzmann, and Emese Domahidi (all Technische Universität Ilmenau), and Heidi Schulze (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), received the 2nd place for the Best Journal Paper in Communication Science 2023 Award by the German Society for Communication Science (DGPuK). The DGPuK award honors outstanding contributions to German journals of communication science. The award was presented at the DGPuK annual conference in Erfurt.

The paper "Mapping a Dark space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non-Institutionalized Actors on Telegram" was published in M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft in 2023. Through a comprehensive literature review, the authors critically address the challenges prevalent in current research conducted on Telegram, offering valuable insights into the field of digital communication. They discuss the methodological challenges of identifying and classifying heterogeneous, often non-institutionalized, radical actors on Telegram.

For further information, see the full open-access paper here.