Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020–2022 (TGCPD)
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.
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
Research Potentials
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.

