Protest movements and the mainstreaming of radical and extremist ideologies: the case of COVID-19 protests

Summary

This paper introduces protest-facilitated mainstreaming (PFM) as a meso-level framework for understanding how protest movements can render radical and extremist ideas more accessible to broader publics via social media. Using Germany’s anti-COVID-19 measures movement Querdenken as a case, the authors triangulate longitudinal content analysis, URL analysis, and network analysis of Telegram data (April 2020–April 2022). They argue that mainstreaming operates through two distinct but complementary sets of mechanisms — content mechanisms (which make radical frames repeatable and legitimate) and connective mechanisms (which route attention toward radical actors and alternative information ecosystems). Querdenken, initially heterogeneous and grassroots, became progressively entangled with far-right and conspiracist networks, with anti-elite framing — rather than explicit ideological commitment — serving as the primary bridge to extremist milieus.

Key Contributions

• Conceptualizes protest-facilitated mainstreaming (PFM) as a meso-level process linking individual motivations to macro-level discursive shifts.
• Distinguishes analytically between content mechanisms and connective mechanisms of mainstreaming.
• Provides a methodological template triangulating longitudinal content, URL, and network analysis on large Telegram corpora.
• Empirically maps how a grassroots single-issue movement became structurally embedded in transnational far-right and conspiracist networks.
• Generalizes propositions to other movements (Yellow Vests, Brexit, Occupy, anti-vaccine activism) where broad-issue framing and anti-establishment stances foster cross-pollination with extremes.

Methods

A triangulated computational-quantitative design over two years of Telegram activity:

• Content analysis: 200 channels containing “Querdenken” scraped via Telethon (630,966 posts); 4,160 most-viewed posts hand-coded by four trained coders for mainstreaming markers (Holsti .77–1.00). Time-series trends tested via Sieve bootstrap t-tests, Mann-Kendall, and WAVK.
• URL analysis: 785,887 URLs extracted; top 100 external domains categorized over time.
• Network analysis: snowball-sampled forwards, 6,008 manually classified channels, disparity-filter backbone (5,535 nodes, 79,404 edges from ~7M forwards), Louvain community detection, HITS hub/authority scores, Gephi/Force-Atlas visualization.

Findings

• Anti-elitism dominated (80% of posts), targeting government (52%) and politicians (31%); rose sharply early in the pandemic.
• Conspiracy narratives appeared in 32% of posts — predominantly COVID-related (68%), but also general (31%) and far-right (18%) conspiracies.
• Explicit far-right ideology was rare (3%) but significantly increased over time, led by nationalism and exclusionism.
• False information present in 46% of posts; visual content in 62% and rising.
• Outlinking shifted away from mainstream social media toward alternative social platforms and alternative/partisan outlets (Reitschuster, Epoch Times, DLive); YouTube accounted for >20% of external links.
• Network structure: 11 communities identified; Querdenken was not central — a community of prominent German far-right figures occupied the brokerage position connecting protesters to German-language and international (QAnon-heavy) conspiracist communities. Additional clusters included Austrian right-wing, neo-Nazi, pro-Russian, alternative-medicine, and Italian-language channels.
• Tentative non-linear evidence that topical focus broadened beyond pandemic-only content over time.

Connections

This work speaks directly to studies of pandemic-era conspiracism and partisan information ecosystems — notably Gaisbauer2025-by on COVID protest dynamics and Kalsnes2025-zb / Knupfer2025-vt on the diffusion of fringe and hyperpartisan content. Its emphasis on alternative-media outlinking and cross-platform brokerage resonates with Starbird2025-jj on participatory disinformation infrastructures and Bennett2025-xs on alternative news ecosystems, while the network-analytic mapping of mainstreaming complements Efstratiou2025-gs and Efstratiou2026-ij on the structural embedding of extremist communities online.

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