Telegram Scraper

This Telegram scraper collects telegram messages, comments (comments.bot/comments.app) and media files. It was originally build for this story on behalf of Addendum.

Contributors: @PeterWalchhofer, @vali101, @fin

Notes

This scraper was written before Telgram introduced its native comment feature for broadcasting channels. Nowadays, comment.bot/comment.app extensions are rarely used anymore. Feel free to make a PR to support this feature. @vali101 re-wrote the scraper for his bachelor thesis here with a focus on snowball sampling. His code may help for extending the scraper or for finding interesting channels in the first place. Check it out!

Setup

Requirements:

• Google Chrome (However, in theory you could als use Firefox when installing the necessary driver manually )
• Python 3
• Telegram Account (Phone Number)
• A lot of storage if downloading media
• Time - arround 3000msg and comments/ per Minute.

Getting Started

1. Install dependencies make install OR just install requirements.txt (using venv is recommended)
2. Create your own channel.csv as explained in the next section
3. Put the phone-number of the linked telegram account int the config.yaml
4. Get your API-key here an put them inside the config.yaml.
5. sh scrape.sh to start the scraper OR run channelscraper/python app.py
6. The outputs will be stored in the /output directory.

Input Data

You need to create your own channels.csvand put it in the /input folder.

Only Link and Broadcast Relevant for scraping. The csv should have the form described below. There also is an example csv in the folder.

Kategorie	Name	Link	@	Broadcast
Gruppe Typ XY	Example Channel	https://t.me/example_channel	example_channel	TRUE

• Kategorie(optional): Metadata to annotate channel
• Name(optional): Not identifier Name
• Link: Link to channel
• @ (optional): Indentifier Name
• Broadcast: ´True´ if channel is Broadcasting Channel ´else´ false. Broadcasting channels are large one-to-many channels that only allow owners to write messages.

Configuration

The Scraper can be further configured via the channelscraper/config.yaml.

Features

Messages

The Scraper extracts all messages from a channel. It is also possible to scrape only those messages that were written in the last x days. This can be set in the config.yaml.

Comment Bots

• In many broadcasting channels comment-bots are used in order to provide feedback from the audience. It is also possible to scrape those messages. Currently comments.app and comments.bot bots are supported.
• Be careful. The date format is different from the telegram-api and has to be parsed manually (e.g. Dec 09)
• As there is a "Load more comments" button it has to be clicked using javascript. Selenium is used to interact with the chrome driver that is installed automatically.

Comments.app

• Unique username extraction is working most of the time. However, if the user has deleted its account, this is not possible.

Comments.bot

• Unique usernames are not extracted, because we found no way to find out without querying the api at a high cost.
• Only the display name is persited

Further remarks

• Messages and comments are persisted in the same csv-file. To tell them apart use the isComment column. Additionally, the ID includes a period in the format msgId.commId (e.g. 101.3)
• We allocated ids to the comments manually. The telegram message ids are unique within a channel.

Optional

If you want to run selenium with docker use selenium/standalone-chrome:3.141.59-yttrium Also see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45323271/how-to-run-selenium-with-chrome-in-docker