Have conservative groups mastered the art of internet activism?
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Initially, people saw the internet as a tool for driving more participatory, pluralistic, and personal discussions, especially around politics.

However, with the exception of major movements like Occupy Wall Street, left-leaning groups haven't made as much use of the internet as right-leaning ones. In her research, Jen Schradie found that liberals see the internet as one tool of many to advocate for fairness; the trouble is, the idea of "fairness" brings together many disparate groups, making it difficult to present an organized, unified front, especially online.

Conservatives see the internet as a vehicle for freedom — freedom from the state, free markets, and freedom of information. Conservatives made the internet their platform, where they could organize and discuss issues that they didn't believe were being represented in the media.
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JEN SCHRADIE

Jen Schradie is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement at Sciences Po in Paris. Her work has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Time, the Daily Beast, and Buzzfeed, among other media. She was awarded the Public Sociology Alumni Prize at University of California, Berkeley, and has directed six documentary films. She is the author of The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (2019).
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TRANSCRIPT:

JEN SCHRADIE: At the dawn of the internet, many believed that it would enable a more participatory, pluralist, and really personalized platform, particularly with politics. And it wasn't long before people were using terms like "Facebook revolution" and "Twitter revolution" to talk about how the internet could enable this more democratic way to participate in collective action. In my research, though, I wanted to, first of all, take a different tact than just looking at these very high profile movements, whether we're talking about the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or more recently the Me Too movement, and really get a more general sense of what was happening on an everyday level.

I found a political issue that attracted groups on the left and the right, because at the time when I started the research in 2011, there were a lot of celebratory reports about very left-leaning movement. So I also wanted to look at conservative groups. And what I found was a very profound digital activism gap. Groups that were more middle to upper class, groups therefore with more resources, but also more organizational infrastructure, more hierarchy, were much more likely to be online. I also found that those groups tended to be more right-leaning or conservative. And it wasn't just these questions around resources and structure, it was also conservatives tended to have a more ideological inclination, more of a motivation to use the internet than groups on the left.

North Carolina really appealed to my methodological inclinations, to be quite honest, because it did really have this far left, far right, and really center political spectrum, Obama won the state in 2008 by a hair. He lost the state, also by a very small margin, in 2012. And this state was really hovering between left and right. So I decided to pick this issue around collective bargaining rights for public employees, because it did attract both these conservative groups, as well as these left-leaning groups. And as a result, I looked at about 34 different organizations that had been politically active on this issue. And they varied on the left side to support labor rights from labor unions, which you would expect, worker centers, but also civil rights groups, the North Carolina NAACP, a student group, and other groups, as well. Because this issue really operated more like a social movement than a traditional labor issue, largely because unions in North Carolina are extremely marginalized. At the time, it had the lowest rate of unionization in the country, and it still hovers at the bottom. But on the other hand, there were Tea Party groups, other patriot groups, like Preppers, and other conservative organizations which were very much opposed to any kind of union issue, especially around public employees. Because for conservatives, the whole idea of public employees really represented government, particularly, big government, which they were opposed to.

And what I found by looking at what -- not only how much they were engaged...

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