Abstract
The aim of this study is to quantitatively assess perception of protests around COVID-19 in Germany from the late July till the end of August 2020 in the Internet media by infodemiological approach. To this end we investigate Google searches, Twitter and Telegram posts, and selection of news articles via EventRegistry. We focus on narratives around Berlin Demonstrations on August 1st and August 29th, 2020. Using media intelligence we spot trends, analyze relevant topics over a longer time span and create sociolinguistic landscapes targeting Querdenken and QAnon movements and other actors such as AfD, SPD, and Green political parties and Antifa. Although the dominant actors of the protest are on the far-right political spectrum, we demonstrate (based on network analysis) that left-wing activists could both sympathize with (e.g. some liberal greens) and oppose (e.g. Antifa) the protest. Although we observe a constant interest in the protest movements in traditional media, their popularity on social media is growing (for Querdenken faster than for QAnon). The revealed insights shed light on social dynamics in the context of such major disruptive events as COVID-19 pandemic and could serve as a basis for optimization of risk awareness campaigns by the authorities.
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AJ was supported with COSTNET (COST Action CA15109) travel grant.
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Jarynowski, A., Semenov, A., Belik, V. (2020). Protest Perspective Against COVID-19 Risk Mitigation Strategies on the German Internet. In: Chellappan, S., Choo, KK.R., Phan, N. (eds) Computational Data and Social Networks. CSoNet 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12575. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66046-8_43
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