Virtual torches - real fires? Online protest mobilization as a forward indicator of politically motivated crimes

This article examines associations between online mobilization efforts on Telegram and subsequent criminal activity during COVID-19-related protests in Germany. Using two comprehensive data sets—one comprising 100,654 calls to protest from 1,315 Telegram channels in Germany’s radical extremist spheres, the other containing 22,993 protest-related criminal incidents reported by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office—we explore the spatial and temporal linkages between mobilization online and protest-related crime offline across German districts from 2020 to 2022. Results of a vector autoregressive model indicate that higher volumes of calls to protest online precede increases in PMC with a one-week lag. Moreover, the relationship appears more pronounced in rural areas, which suggests that digital platforms such as Telegram may play a heightened role in mobilizing less densely populated regions. Those and other results elucidate how mobilization efforts online correspond with patterns of political behavior offline and the dynamic’s broader implications for societal and law enforcement strategies as well as provide a foundation for further research addressing online mobilization and its sociopolitical impacts.