News/Research

Jen Schradie on Digital Activism on LSE US Centre

25 Jan, 2019

Jen Schradie on Digital Activism on LSE US Centre

"When I started my research project on digital activism, I expected to find some socioeconomic inequality. But even I, a digital inequality scholar, was shocked at just how much."

The London School of Economics US Centre's daily blog on American politics and policy recently published Jen Schradie's findings on the class and race divide in digital activism. Jen Schradie dived into the digital democracy to observe just who partakes in discussion on online platform. She found that there are big divisions based off of socioeconomic status, income, and education level. In this specific case, Schradie looks into the digital activism in North Carolina regarding labor laws.

I found 34 groups in this political arena organized around this issue, and I created a digital activism score for each group based on their website, Facebook and Twitter use. The score not only captured what the groups themselves created but also how (and how much) people participated with them online. In my research, I show that middle/upper-class groups not only developed these platforms more than their working-class counterparts, but they also had heightened online participation, as well. In fact, out of the over 60,000 Tweets that these groups had posted during the course of the study, only one came from a working-class group, which was statistically zero.

Read her entire post here.