Unearthing a Billion Telegram Posts about the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: Development of a Public Dataset

With its lenient moderation and long-standing associations with potentially unlawful activities, Telegram has become an incubator for problematic content, frequently featuring conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, and fringe narratives.Exacerbating these concerns, investigations have underscored Telegram's role in organizing violent acts, such as those that occurred during the Capitol Hill attack on January 6, 2021.As of 2024, Telegram represents a focal arena for societal and political discourse, warranting close attention from the research community, regulators, and the media.Thus, we present a Telegram dataset focused on the 2024 US Presidential Election, comprising over 43 thousand chats and over 1 billion messages, and featuring chats' details, profile pictures, messages, and user information.In addition, we present application scenarios for this dataset, such as the construction of a network of chats, which can facilitate the analysis of interconnected communities, and a sample of harmful messages aimed at mobilizing supporters ahead of now-reported protests, which can serve as a case study to explore coordinated dynamics from the online to the offline world.This resource represents the largest public Telegram dataset to date, offering an unprecedented opportunity to study political discussion on Telegram.