“Free-Thinking” on Telegram (mostly): Hybrid Ethnography, ‘Flat Methodologies’ and the UK Freedom Movement

Reflecting on fieldwork conducted with the UK Freedom Movement, I explore how a hybrid online and offline approach, following the flow of people and (counter)knowledge practices across multiple sites, supported a sustained engagement with the Movement, as a self-recognising “epistemological community”. A “conspiracy attuned” social movement (Davis 2024), the Freedom Movement first emerged in opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and mass vaccination. However, it has since embedded itself as a network of campaign groups, political parties and “off-grid” communities, united in opposing an allegedly-unfolding “Great Reset”. I consider how the public channels and discussion groups of the social media platform Telegram represented ethnographic gateways. Firstly, in picking up the threads of its cross-platform ecology of (“conspiracy”) theory sharing; and secondly, in engaging directly with individual Movement members and campaign groups.

I highlight some of the ethical challenges of conducting ethnography within “counterpublic” spaces such as “Freedom Movement Telegram” (Warner 2002), focusing on one instance of planned militant (and legally questionable) action. I draw attention to discrepancies between the easily-accessible – and by default, unencrypted – nature of Telegram’s public discussion groups, and the affects of secrecy and subversiveness associated with the platform by many Movement members. In doing so, I ask how one might respond as an ethnographer to such instances of very-private behaviour in very-public (digital) spaces.

While highlighting Telegram’s centrality for the UK Freedom Movement’s activist organising and (counter)theorising, I demonstrate how a “platform neutral” approach to ethnography allowed me to “follow the issues” most flexibly, across social media threads, podcasts, blogs, marches and meetups. In doing so, I signpost John Postill’s description of digital ethnography as a ‘flat methodology’ (2024), pragmatically utilising ‘”whatever works”’ when studying social movements. I argue that “following the narrative” in this way unlocks ethnographic proximity to Freedom Movement practices of digitally mediated “truth-seeking”.