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DP-R|EX Data publication

How did the movement against COVID-19 containment measures take shape? The newly released Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset (TGCPD) provides a unique digital lens on this question. Spanning from March 2020 to December 2022, it documents 5.6 million public messages posted across 943 Telegram channels and group chats linked to Germany’s Querdenken movement and its wider network.

Figure: Monthly Message Count Across Entities’ Movement Role.

As shown in the figure, message activity skyrocketed from the early months of 2020 to more than five million messages by 2022—tracing the rise and persistence of a protest movement that largely organized itself online. The result is an exceptional data resource of great depth and scale, ready for scholarly research into digital mobilization and networked activism.

The data contains message texts, metadata, link structures (forward links), and network metrics, providing insights into how information and influence flowed through the protest ecosystem. By combining several carefully curated data sources, researchers can even partially recover deleted or short-lived content, a rare achievement in Telegram research.

Information about the study and details about the data access can be found here: https://doi.org/10.4232/1.14316

Social movement studies – Quantifiable, long-term insights into the organization of the German Querdenken movement.


Network analysis – Mapping connections between core and peripheral actors, feedback loops, and influence dynamics.


Content studies – Exploring dominant themes, rhetoric (e.g., conspiracy narratives), and their spread across networks.


Platform governance – Investigating message and channel deletions and their implications for data transparency.

 

DP-R|EX Data publication

DP-R|EX is proud to announce the release of the dataset “Radical and Extremist Attitudes in Europe”, now available at the GESIS Data Archive. The data are available here:

https://doi.org/10.4232/1.14540

The online survey (CAWI) comprised 5,543 interviews, including 4,748 complete responses, and was conducted by Marvin Stein. It investigates the so-called “Querdenken” movement, which emerged in Germany in response to protests against the measures introduced to contain the spread of COVID-19. The survey captures protest-related and populist attitudes, personality traits, and conspiracy beliefs, as well as party identification and sympathies with social movements associated with the protest scene. A study description, including information on the covered concepts and groups, can be found in the DP-R|EX data explorer.

Comparative analyses revealed significant differences between participants in the Querdenken movement and the broader German population, particularly with respect to socio-economic attitudes and views on immigration.