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

Radical and extremist actors leverage social media to subtly embed their worldviews into everyday discourse. Drawing on mainstreaming theory, we examine whether protest movements can facilitate such processes by creating environments conducive to a public shift toward the extremes. We conceptualize protest-facilitated mainstreaming (PFM) as a process that operates through content and connective mechanisms on social media and explore the case of the German COVID-19-measures protest movement ‘Querdenken,’ which sparked interest from sympathizers of various backgrounds. Using a multi-layered Telegram dataset in a quantitative-computational approach, we triangulate longitudinal content analysis, URL analysis, and network analysis. Across methods, a consistent picture emerged, demonstrating how Querdenken’s content made radical ideas more accessible. Our findings reveal that protest communication was dominated by anti-elite and conspiratorial narratives, with increasing references to alternative/partisan sources and fringe actors. Protest channels were structurally embedded in and bridged to German and international far-right and conspiracist communities. Together, these patterns show how protest movements can lower the threshold for encountering, revisiting, and recirculating fringe frames and actors over time, which is at the core of mainstreaming. We conclude by discussing the applicability of our findings to other protest movements and the implications for society and (platform) governance.