Data Spotlight #9
As dedicated data curators, we’re excited to showcase curated data collections that will hopefully ignite your research interests. Today we present you:
Thematic Data Collection: Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020–2022 (TGCPD)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, protest movements against containment measures emerged in many countries. In German-speaking contexts, these protests were largely organised around the “Querdenken” (‘lateral thinking’) movement. Their coordination and mobilisation relied heavily on social media, with Telegram quickly becoming the key platform. Understanding how such movements mobilise and communicate online requires systematic empirical data, yet comprehensive Telegram datasets remain rare. The platform’s dynamic nature, including frequent message and channel deletions, complicates the retrospective reconstruction of communication networks, making longitudinal datasets particularly valuable.
The Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020–2022 (TGCPD), compiled by researchers from the University of Munich, Freie Universität Berlin, and TU Ilmenau, provides such a resource. It documents German-language protest mobilisation on Telegram between 2020 and 2022. Using seed-based and snowball sampling, it focuses on publicly accessible channels and groups associated with Querdenken and related actors. The dataset comprises 715 broadcast channels and 229 public group chats, with a total of 5,641,026 messages. Unlike many other Telegram collections, it was manually classified and processed, enabling a detailed longitudinal overview of the movement and its communication network. In addition to message texts, it contains metadata, network data, and geolocation information, permitting analyses of both content and structure.
The dataset supports research on digital protest mobilisation, online communication networks, and narrative diffusion within political movements. It allows analyses of organisational patterns, evolving communication structures, and relations between central and peripheral actors, as well as content-focused studies of dominant themes, conspiracy narratives, and platform dynamics such as deletions. Data were collected repeatedly over time, minimising data loss and enhancing historical value.
The dataset is archived with DP-R|EX, a research data infrastructure on racism and right-wing extremism led by GESIS in cooperation with Qualiservice and the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). Due to the data’s sensitivity, access is restricted to eligible projects and limited to research on extremist ideologies, hate speech, anti-democratic radicalisation, and state-threatening disinformation.
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