Chris Liebold
We are delighted to have received a special honour for our Group: Maximilian Zehring and Prof. Emese Domahidi have been awarded the Technical University of Ilmenau’s Publication Prize in the ‘Economic and Social Sciences’ category. The prize, worth 2,500 euros, was awarded on 6 October 2026 and recognises outstanding academic publications that demonstrate international visibility, methodological rigour and social or technological relevance.
The award was given for the study ‘German Corona Protest Mobilisers on Telegram and Their Relations to the Far Right: A Network and Topic Analysis’, which was published in the journal *Social Media + Society*.
How do protest networks function on Telegram?
The award-winning study examines the communication of the ‘Querdenken’ movement – which played a central role in the German Covid-19 protests – on the Telegram platform. The focus is on how protest networks organise themselves digitally, what content is disseminated within these networks, and what links exist to far-right and conspiracy theory actors.
To this end, Maximilian Zehring and Prof. Emese Domahidi analysed a total of 6,294,955 messages from 578 public Telegram channels. Using computer-assisted methods, they investigated, amongst other things, which content is shared particularly frequently, which actors within the network are particularly influential, and which topics shape the communication over time.
“This made our study one of the very first systematic investigations of the Querdenken movement on Telegram,” explained lead author Maximilian Zehring at the award ceremony.
The results show that various sub-groups within the Querdenken movement shared content primarily from far-right and QAnon communities. At the same time, far-right and conspiracy-theory-based alternative media channels acted as key distributors of content within the network.
For Prof. Emese Domahidi, the study thus also underlines the social relevance of research into digital public spheres:
“Many of the actors examined are still active today, including at a political level. This naturally means the study remains relevant.”
The award thus not only recognises a scientifically and methodologically rigorous investigation into digital protest communication, but also highlights the importance of computer-assisted communication research for understanding dynamic digital public spheres.
We warmly congratulate Maximilian Zehring and Prof. Emese Domahidi on this award!
For more information on the other award winners and the university news: www.tu-ilmenau.de/unionline/forschung/details/wissenschaftliche-exzellenz-die-internationale-debatten-mitpraegt-1940