The Conspiracy Money Machine: Uncovering Telegram's Conspiracy Channels and their Profit Model

In recent years, major social media platforms have implemented increasingly strict moderation policies, resulting in bans and restrictions on conspiracy theory-related content. To circumvent these restrictions, conspiracy theorists are turning to alternatives, such as Telegram, where they can express and spread their views with fewer limitations. Telegram offers channels -- virtual rooms where only administrators can broadcast messages -- and a more permissive content policy. These features have created the perfect breeding ground for a complex ecosystem of conspiracy channels. In this paper, we illuminate this ecosystem. First, we propose an approach to detect conspiracy channels. Then, we discover that conspiracy channels can be clustered into four distinct communities comprising over 17,000 channels. Finally, we uncover the "Conspiracy Money Machine," revealing how most conspiracy channels actively seek to profit from their subscribers. We find conspiracy theorists leverage e-commerce platforms to sell questionable products or lucratively promote them through affiliate links. Moreover, we observe that conspiracy channels use donation and crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their campaigns. We determine that this business involves hundreds of donors and generates a turnover of over $90 million

Corpus callosum abnormalities: neuroimaging, cytogenetics and clinical characterization of a very large multicenter Italian series

Corpus callosum abnormalities (CCA) have an estimated prevalence ranging from 0.3% up to 0.7% in patients undergoing brain imaging. CCA can be identified incidentally, or can be part of a developmental disease. We performed a retrospective study of 551 patients, identified non-syndromic (NS) CCA and syndromic (S) CCA, reviewing clinical features, neuroradiological aspects, genetic etiology, and chromosomal microarray (CMA) results. Syndromic CCA subjects were prevalent (60%) and they showed the most severe clinical features. Cortical malformations and cerebellar anomalies were 23% of cerebral malformation associated to CCA (plus), 23 and 14% respectively in syndromic forms. A clinical and/or genetic diagnosis was obtained in 37% of syndromic CCA including chromosomal rearrangements on high-resolution karyotype (18%), microdeletion/microduplication syndromes (31%) and monogenic diseases (51%). Non-syndromic CCA anomalies had mildest clinical features, although intellectual disability was present in 49% of cases and epilepsy in 13%. CMA diagnostic rate in our cohort of patients ranged from 11 to 23% (NS to S). A high percentage of patients (76% 422/551) remain without a diagnosis. Combined high resolution CMA studies and next-generation sequencing (NGS) strategies will increase the probability to identify new causative genes of CCA and to redefine genotype–phenotype correlation