German Corona Protest Mobilizers on Telegram and Their Relations to the Far Right: A Network and Topic Analysis

Abstract

The Querdenken movement, the leading force behind German corona protests, is suspected of being a gateway to far-right attitudes due to radicalizing inward-oriented communication on Telegram. To investigate potential connections of this movement to the far right and alternative media—and to explore key topics of the Querdenken network over time—we analyzed 6,294,955 messages from 578 public Telegram channels via network analysis and structural topic modeling. This analysis revealed that Querdenken’s subcommunities preferably forward content from far-right and QAnon communities, while far-right and conspiracy theorist alternative media channels act as content distributors for the movement. Four main topics appeared in the Querdenken network with varying prevalence over time and across different communities: promotion, QAnon, right-wing populism, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Our results highlight potential directions for future research and practical implications, for example, that political decision makers should account for the increasing influence of the QAnon movement on Querdenken mobilizers’ Telegram activity.

Difficulties faced by physicians from four European countries in rebutting anti-vaccination arguments

“…While trust in science has increased in Germany since the beginning of the pandemic (Bromme, Mede, Thomm, Kremer, & Ziegler, 2022), a significant minority including individuals with conspiracist, esoteric, and extreme political views organised frequent street protests that were used to express distrust towards the government and conventional medicine (Zehring & Domahidi, 2023). Fuelled by far-right sentiment, the distrust messages of these protests have been described as polarising and radicalising (Vieten, 2020;Zehring & Domahidi, 2023) and may have increased the impression among physicians that it is particularly difficult to counter this form of distrust and reactance in a rational discussion.…”

From criticism to conspiracies: The populist discourse of COVID-19 sceptics in Germany’s Querdenken community on Telegram

“…By categorising channels and groups according to the topics found in previous studies (Curley et al, 2022;Holzer, 2021;Zehring and Domahidi, 2023), the construction of (far-right) populist narratives and frames, and the politicisation of a public health crisis within specific communities by combining topics/issues was explored beyond general topic modelling. The results show that narrative and frame construction follow clear mechanisms of personifying threats, most obvious in references to Merkel, Spahn (government actors at the time) and their conservative party alliance as out-actors, but also current government of social democrats, greens, and liberals.…”

“…A total of 152 channels and groups were identified, and their entire chat histories were extracted as well (n1 = 1,426,938 messages). Based on previously-identified relevant categories (Curley et al, 2022;Holzer, 2021;Zehring and Domahidi, 2023), a broad categorisation of the contents in each channel and group was made to create smaller sub-samples: Querdenken (n = 617,119; movement infrastructure featuring the name), Activism (n = 273,001; social and political activism), Info (n = 316,126; general information about pandemic-related issues), News (n = 95,284; news outlets and stories), Protest (n = 69,864; information and organisation of protests), Lawyers (n = 33,438; legal advice) and Doctors (n = 22,106; health advice). For the semi-automated quantitative content analysis, only messages featuring exclusively text (n2 = 1,273,744) were kept in the sample.…”

“…This leaves room for network agendas in which prioritised issues and their connection within semantic networks (Guo, 2015) can be associated with specific news media, activists, parties, and politicians, making them identifiable with such issues (Guo and Vargo, 2015), like anti-COVID-19 restrictions protests, vaccine scepticism or critique of authorities. For instance, Zehring and Domahidi (2023: 5) find several clusters featuring alternative media, movement channels, alternative medicine, and activism as descriptors within Querdenken communications. Curley et al (2022) identify information sharing and medical themed groups in a similar Irish network, and Holzer (2021) observes protest, news, and legal advice related clusters in the early stage of Querdenken infrastructure.…”

“…Researchers found strong connections between Querdenken channels, conspiracy, and QAnon channels, arguing that ‘renowned far-right actors and activists not only are part of this network but also play a key role in determining who Querdenken channels take content from’ (Zehring and Domahidi, 2023: 8). A substantial number of far-right alternative media links were identified through network and topic analyses of Germany’s Querdenken Telegram network, its infrastructure described as ‘attempts to construct a “reality” corresponding to the protest, based on and distancing themselves from mass media, parliamentary politics and science’ (Holzer, 2021: 11), thus emphasising the importance of analysing both infrastructure and content to fully understand the environment’s information influx, dynamics and discourses.…”