We traced copy-pasted posts across Telegram. One army recruitment ad ran in 280 job channels

A Telegram post rarely stays in one channel. Owners publish the same text in their other channels, advertisers buy the same post in dozens of channels at once, and aggregators repost what others wrote. We matched 358,604 posts longer than 200 characters from 46,770 channels, published between April 27, 2026 and August 25, 2026, and looked for texts that appear word for word in more than one channel.

9.3% of the posts, about one in eleven, also appeared in at least one other channel. 10,672 distinct texts were shared this way, by 9,734 channels: 21% of the channels in our sample.

How we matched posts

We collect posts from public channels for our event pages. For this article we took every post in that sample with at least 200 characters of text, lower-cased it, collapsed whitespace and fingerprinted the first 400 characters. Two posts with the same fingerprint carry the same text. Short posts are left out because a short caption such as a date or a greeting repeats by chance.

The first channel to publish a text in our sample is counted as its source and the rest as copies. That is a statement about our sample, not about authorship: the true original may sit in a channel we do not collect.

Most copies come from the same owner, within a minute

Leaving out texts that ran in 10 or more channels, which are mostly paid placements, we counted 16,372 copies. The median copy appeared 22 min after the source. 35.7% went out within the same minute, 54.5% within an hour and 81.5% within a day. Only 6.1% came a week or more later.

A copy that lands within a minute is posted by a person or a bot that runs both channels. The ad contacts in channel descriptions, which we used to map Telegram's ad networks, point the same way: 32.5% of channel pairs that copy each other within a minute list the same ad contact, against 15.5% of pairs where the copy came later.

206 texts reached 10 channels or more, and 68% of those were posted within 48 hours. Only 4 reached 50 channels.

Which languages and topics copy the most

The share of posts that also appear in another channel ranges from 44.9% in Burmese and 32.3% in French to 3.4% in Spanish and 2.1% in Italian. In Burmese the copies come mostly from film channels posting the same synopsis of the same film, plus casino promotions shared by a few dozen channels. About half of the French-language copies are sponsor promotions in betting channels.

By topic, film and job channels lead: roughly a third of their posts appear in another channel. Film channels repost releases; job channels repost vacancies, and as the next sections show, recruitment ads.

Army recruitment ads in job channels

The text that reached the most channels was not news. It was an ad for a contract-service selection point of Russia's Ministry of Defence in Moscow, listing a one-off payment. It first appeared in 3 channels in the week of Jul 13; by the week of Jul 27 it was running in 159. By August 12, 2026 it had been posted 926 times in 280 channels, many of which repeated it several times.

247 of the 280 channels are job channels, typically local vacancy boards for a Russian city; the median one has 19,610 subscribers. Military channels, where one might expect such an ad, are almost absent.

It was not the only one. We found 49 distinct texts recruiting for the army, posted in 393 channels with 10.7 million subscriptions between them; 350 of those channels are job or career channels. Among them: contract military service “with the biggest payments” (58 channels, all on one day); “Severny Rubezh”: a paid reserve-corps training programme (31 channels, all on one day) and contract service for women in the Africa Corps (25 channels, all on one day).

We do not know who paid for these placements or what they cost. The pattern is visible from outside: the ads run alongside ordinary vacancies, in channels whose readers are looking for work.

Vacancy farms

Ordinary vacancies spread the same way. 54 vacancy texts reached 10 channels or more, together 396 channels. A typical one landed in 20 channels over about 27 hours: the same job, the same salary, the same wording, posted by a family of city channels named after the town they serve.

One text stands apart: a legal explainer about being fired for uploading work data to a chatbot, posted in 111 channels on the same day. Identical timing across that many unrelated channels is what a paid placement looks like.

Whose posts get copied

Counting only texts that reached fewer than 10 channels, so that paid placements do not dominate, these are the channels whose posts were picked up by the most other channels. Pavel Durov's channel leads: 19 channels republished 9 of his posts word for word. 8 of the top 15 are job channels.

Channels that promote each other

Posts also link to other channels by @username or t.me link. In the same sample we found 22,330 pairs of channels where one mentioned the other, from 5,324 channels. 1,284 pairs mention each other both ways. Where every channel in a group mentions at least three others in the group and is mentioned back, we call it a circle: 13 circles with 169 channels.

The largest circle joins 52 Arabic-language channels with 2.1 million subscriptions. Across all circles, Persian-language channels are the most common: 74 of 169. Not every circle is a growth scheme: some are the regional channels of one organisation linking to each other, which is exactly what they should do.

On channel pages

These measurements feed the “What our data says” block on channel pages: how many of a channel's posts were copied by others, how many it published after another channel, who mentions it and whether it belongs to a circle. See Pavel Durov's channel for an example.