Alt-tech in Spain: mapping the Spanish far-right ecosystem on Telegram

Abstract

In the context of ongoing debates about the impact of social media platforms on democracies, there is growing academic interest in the proliferation of alt-tech ecosystems, that is, alternative platforms where the far-right is strengthened. In Spain, the electoral breakthrough of Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF) in 2024 and the Torre-Pacheco riots of 2025 appear to have been driven by a set of Telegram channels linked to the far right. This article offers a first systematic exploration of these channels, with the aim of examining whether they display structural and functional features consistent with the notion of an alt-tech ecosystem as proposed in the literature. The study analyses a corpus of 4,960,330 messages from 66 public Spanish-language channels, spanning late 2017 to August 2025, classified into four categories: debate forums and communities, news and pseudo-media channels, political influencers and opinion leaders, and parties, associations or organised collectives. The findings suggest a diversification of communication strategies across categories. Debate forums concentrate the largest proportion of text-only messages, while the remaining categories reflect multimodal patterns previously described in the literature. Clear differences are also observed in cross-platform usage and in the patterns of message forwarding within the ecosystem.