Social Movement Power in Digitally Networked Protest: A Study of Anti-Covid Communities on Telegram

This dissertation investigates how protest communities exhibit social movement power within digitally networked environments, using the German anti-Covid movement on Telegram as its empirical case. During the Covid-19 crisis, Telegram became the movement’s central communication infrastructure, enabling a heterogeneous set of actors—including parent-led, conspiracy-oriented, esoteric, and far-right communities—to coordinate action and circulate competing narratives. Understanding how influence emerged within this shared digital environment requires a systematic approach to assessing how protest communities display social movement power in digital settings. To meet this challenge, the dissertation develops the WUNNC framework, which expands Charles Tilly’s components of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment with the additional component of network to capture the relational and infrastructural dimension of power in digital protest environments, particularly the capacity to control information flows. Analyzing more than seven million Telegram messages, the study applies a computational social science approach combining large-scale network analysis with automated text analysis, and complements these techniques with targeted qualitative analysis to contextualize and verify key patterns. The five components of WUNNC—worthiness, unity, network, numbers, and commitment—are operationalized as a set of platform-tailored empirical indicators that enable systematic comparison of how communities display different forms of social movement power. The analysis identifies fifteen distinct anti-Covid communities on Telegram which derived social movement power from varied combinations of the WUNNC components. No community attained consistently high levels across all five dimensions. Instead, influence within this digitally networked protest space emerged from selective constellations of partial strengths, with different communities dominating distinct components of social movement power. The findings reveal which communities held the strongest and weakest positions within the anti-Covid movement’s digital protest environment and illuminate the distinct combinations of capacities that produced these differences in power. By developing and empirically applying the WUNNC framework, the dissertation provides a theoretical and analytical foundation for systematically assessing the distinct forms of social movement power that communities exhibit in digitally networked protest.