The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rita Hermann-Gsenger, whose focus is on the German Querdenken movement which emerged especially in response to COVID-19 government health measures; it started in early 2020 and peaked in August 2020, and used Telegram as a key tool for its own organisation.
The key interest here is on Querdenken’s monetisation ecosystem; this combines platform-mediated income with multi-channel monetisation strategies. It draws on heterogeneous monetisation streams in a layered environment of communication, payment, financial, and commercial infrastructures.
The approach to this can be split into a material and symbolic dimension: materially, there is advertising revenue, subscriptions, direct audience support, affiliated marketing, and product sales, representing a hybrid material resource mobilisation; symbolically, this is motivated by collective victimisation rhetoric that generates solidarity and support while legitimising resistance, and builds epistemically authority separate from conventional, state-legitimised actors.
This project explored these financial practices and their rhetorical legitimisation by drawing on a dataset of some 5.6 million posts from 715 broadcast channels and 229 public group channels on Telegram, which was already divided into core, periphery, and individual actors; these posts were filtered for references to financial themes.
This identified some 53k messages related to dominations, 47k messages about crowdfunding, 33k messages about crypto-marketing, and 23k messages relating to e-commerce and affiliate marketing.
Rhetorically, financing emerged as a form of resistance against state oppression, with threat scenarios, conspiracist narratives, and us/them divisions highlighted; there were also victimhood and persecution narratives which positioned financial support as a moral action to fight censorship, legal persecution, deplatforming, and economic exclusion; an emphasis on community and collective solidarity as a motivation for financial support, with strong emotional appeals highlighting vulnerability, family values, cultural structures, and humour; appeals to alternative knowledge and authority structures (epistemic, legal, and moral) who were positioned as true experts; and a promise of alternative economies supported by crypto-currencies that would free participants from he shackles of mainstream government structures, with strong utopian undertones.
Together, these position Querdenken as an authentic grassroots movement that is a victim of state oppression for its rebellion against the state; donations are requested to be able to maintain this struggle.
