False equivalencies: Online activism from left to right
Abstract
Digital media are critical for contemporary activism—even low-effort “clicktivism” is politically consequential and contributes to offline participation. We argue that in the United States and throughout the industrialized West, left- and right-wing activists use digital and legacy media differently to achieve political goals. Although left-wing actors operate primarily through “hashtag activism” and offline protest, right-wing activists manipulate legacy media, migrate to alternative platforms, and work strategically with partisan media to spread their messages. Although scholarship suggests that the right has embraced strategic disinformation and conspiracy theories more than the left, more research is needed to reveal the magnitude and character of left-wing disinformation. Such ideological asymmetries between left- and right-wing activism hold critical implications for democratic practice, social media governance, and the interdisciplinary study of digital politics.
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The significant amount of attention the BLM hashtag gained was partially due to the news coverage that amplified it.
“This can be evidenced by the significant amount of attention the BLM hashtag gained, which was partially due to the news coverage that amplified it (Freelon et al. 2020).”
From Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings (2025) · cites this paper as Freelon et al. 2020
BLM activists use platforms such as Twitter to directly speak with users and to gain media attention.
“BLM activists use platforms such as Twitter to directly speak with users and to gain media attention.”
From Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings (2025) · cites this paper as Freelon et al. 2020
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- Authors
- Freelon, D., Marwick, A., & Kreiss, D.
- Affiliations
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
- Corresponding author
- Freelon, Deen
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2020-09-04
- Volume
- 369
- Issue
- 6508
- Pages
- 1197-1201
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W3082093598
- Cited by
- 281
- References
- 54
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 55 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 64 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 12.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Populism, Right-Wing Movements
- Keywords
- digital activism, clicktivism, hashtag activism, left-wing activism, right-wing activism, disinformation, conspiracy theories, traditional media, partisan media, ideological asymmetry, social media governance, internet and politics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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