Chris Liebold
Maximilian Zehring and Emese Domahidi published their new article “The language similarity between corona protest mobilizers on Telegram and German politicians on Twitter” in the journal Information, Communication & Society. The paper explores the Querdenken movement’s ability to stimulate the discourse in the political arena. Maximilian Zehring and Emese Domahidi investigated language similarity between Querdenken and German politicians using n = 934,432 Querdenken Telegram messages and n = 445,690 tweets from all six major German parties across 2020–2021. Their approach combined sentence transformers, time series analysis, and a manual assessment. They found that, for different reasons, all German parties became increasingly semantically similar to Querdenken after fall/winter 2020. While the AfD’s communications are the most similar, the discrediting of left-wing and green politics and the spurning of coronavirus containment measures also unite parts of the Free Democratic Party and Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union in Bavaria with Querdenken. The results highlight communicative resemblances to Querdenken among other established parties besides the AfD and raise questions about the strategic engagement with far-right discourses in anticipation of potential voter gains.
More details about the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2536160