Online media have become a central part of Germans’ media repertoires, creating new opportunity structures for “dark participation” including the spreading of misinformation, hate and fear speech and online propaganda. The consequences of dark participation for personal and collective well-being can be dire. Consequently, strengthening and safeguarding democracy in the digital age requires a deepened understanding of the emerging digital opportunity structures for both dark participation and the fostering of digital democratic resilience. The interdisciplinary junior research group DemoRESILdigital contributed to this understanding by (1) studying particularly active “dark participants” such as alternative news media, the far-right, Islamic extremists, and conspiracy ideologues. (2) Examining the role of entertainment and emotions for the staging of dark participation on social media. (3) Testing the effects of dark participation on media users and (4) exploring intervention measures suitable to foster digital democratic resilience in the digital space. A special focus laid on the combination of traditional methods from the social sciences, such as manual content analysis, surveys, and experiments, with computational methods such as natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning.