Rothut, S., Schulze, H., Rieger, D., Lechner, M., & Naderer, B. (2026). Protest movements and the mainstreaming of radical and extremist ideologies: the case of COVID-19 protests. Information, Communication & Society, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2026.2654668
Summary
This paper introduces the concept of protest-facilitated mainstreaming (PFM): the argument that protest movements create meso-level communicative conditions making radical and extremist ideas more accessible to broader publics via social media. Using the German 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 show that protest communication was dominated by anti-elite and conspiratorial framing, that external outlinking migrated toward alternative and partisan media ecosystems, and that ostensibly grassroots protest channels became structurally embedded within German and international far-right and conspiracist communities. Mainstreaming, they contend, is best understood as a gradual, discursive, boundary-shifting process—distinct from but overlapping with individual-level radicalization—that lowers the threshold for encountering and recirculating fringe frames and actors.
Key Contributions
- Conceptualizes protest-facilitated mainstreaming (PFM) as a meso-level bridge between individual motivations and macro-level discursive shifts.
- Distinguishes content mechanisms (how communication makes radical frames repeatable and legitimate) from connective mechanisms (how protest infrastructures route attention toward radical actors and environments).
- Methodological triangulation of content, URL, and network analysis over a large two-year Telegram corpus.
- Empirically maps how a heterogeneous, initially grassroots protest movement became structurally embedded in far-right and conspiracist networks.
- Extends propositions beyond Querdenken to other broad-issue, anti-establishment movements (Yellow Vests, Brexit, Occupy, anti-vaccine activism).
Methods
The authors develop the PFM framework from mainstreaming theory, social movement theory, and platform affordance research, then test it with a triangulated computational design on Telegram. The content analysis scraped 200 channels containing “Querdenken” (630,966 posts) and hand-coded 4,160 most-viewed posts for mainstreaming markers (Holsti intercoder reliability .77–1.00), with time-series trend testing (Sieve bootstrap t-test, Mann-Kendall, WAVK). The URL analysis extracted 785,887 links, focusing on 327,420 external domain-level URLs and categorizing the top 100 domains over time. The network analysis used snowball sampling of forwarding connections, manual classification of 6,008 channels, disparity-filter backbone extraction (5,535 nodes, 79,404 edges), Louvain community detection, HITS hub/authority scoring, and Gephi Force-Atlas visualization.
Findings
- Anti-elitism was the dominant content feature (80% of posts), rising sharply early in the pandemic; government (52%) and specific politicians (31%) were the most frequent targets.
- Conspiracy narratives appeared in 32% of posts—mostly COVID-related (68%), but also general (31%) and far-right (18%) conspiracies.
- Explicit far-right ideological content was rare (3%) but significantly increased over time (nationalism, exclusionism most frequent).
- False information appeared in 46% of posts; visual content in 62% and rose significantly.
- Outlinking shifted significantly away from mainstream social media toward alternative platforms and alternative/partisan outlets (Reitschuster, Epoch Times, DLive); YouTube alone was over 20% of external links.
- The network had 11 substantive communities; Querdenken was not central—prominent German far-right figures occupied the central brokerage position, connecting protesters to German-language and international (QAnon-heavy) conspiracy clusters.
- Additional communities included Austrian right-wing channels, neo-Nazi parties, pro-Russian channels, alternative-medicine advocates, and Italian clusters, indicating transnational entanglement.
- Tentative non-linear evidence of topic broadening beyond the movement’s initial pandemic focus.
Connections
This paper extends the mainstreaming-of-the-far-right agenda that Marwick2025-ov and Marwick2025-vx develop conceptually, offering an empirical meso-level mechanism for how fringe frames migrate into broader publics. Its Telegram network and forwarding analysis speaks directly to work on platform-based diffusion and conspiratorial community structure such as Grusauskaite2026-po and Gaisbauer2025-by, while its computational network methods align with the structural-analysis approaches in Minici2024-tf and Ng2026-og. The focus on protest movements and anti-establishment mobilization also links it to Askanius2026-de on far-right online milieus.
Podcast
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