Political movements that shape digital discourse
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Survivor support movement founded in 2006 whose associated hashtag became a mass public disclosure campaign about sexual harassment and assault in October 2017
Decentralized protest network that began with a Reddit post in January 2025 and coordinates same-day demonstrations across all fifty states against actions of the second Trump administration
Current within violent extremism holding that acts of violence should be committed to hasten the collapse of existing political order, circulated through online manifestos and encrypted channels
Media producers operating outside newsroom institutions, funded directly by audiences and distributed through platforms rather than through publishers or broadcasters
Online movement centred on white identity that organized through imageboards, forums and social platforms, and whose principal organizers were found liable for conspiracy over the 2017 Unite the Right rally
Online subculture that circulated nationalist and identitarian political messaging through memes and layered irony, drawing its aesthetic and its ambiguity from imageboard culture
Effort to build social platforms, payment and hosting services positioned as minimally moderated alternatives to mainstream technology companies
Movement organizing without hierarchy or formal leadership, associated in the United States with the 1999 global justice protests, participant-run media, and mutual aid networks
Current advocating the replacement of state functions by private contract and market provision, with a substantial overlap into cryptocurrency development and advocacy
Decentralized collective originating on imageboard culture, in which anyone may act under a shared name, associated with distributed denial-of-service campaigns, document leaks and masked street protest
Strand of anti-abortion activity that targets individual clinics and providers through obstruction, publication of personal information and, in documented cases, violence
Advocacy opposing restrictions on online expression, beginning with the legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and later extending to private platform moderation
Coalition opposing international trade agreements and the institutions governing them, which disrupted the WTO's Seattle ministerial in 1999 and built the first participant-run protest media network
Loose YouTube-centred commentary movement of the 2010s built on response videos and debate content opposing what participants labelled social justice activism
Movement opposing tax increases, organized chiefly through a written pledge that binds signing legislators and through the organization that administers it
Movement opposing vaccine mandates and disputing vaccine safety, whose modern form followed a 1998 paper later retracted by The Lancet and which reached its widest reach during the COVID-19 pandemic
Movement opposing American military intervention, mobilized at scale against the Iraq war and studied for how rapidly it demobilized once party control of the presidency changed
Campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in corporations, government and education, conducted through litigation, state legislation and public pressure
Decentralized network of independent local groups and individuals who identify as antifascist and organize to track and counter groups they identify as fascist
Wave of protests and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa beginning in Tunisia in December 2010, widely studied for the role of social media in mobilization
Short-lived 2012 effort to extend online atheist and skeptic organizing to social justice concerns, whose failure split the community it came from
Black Americans who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and the commentators and organizations that address that constituency, historically a small minority of Black political identification
Movement against police violence and racial inequality that began with a phrase posted online in July 2013 and organizes through decentralized local chapters and mass protest
Loose network of YouTube creators producing long-form video essays from a left perspective, formed in opposition to the prominence of right-wing political commentary on the platform
Student political organizing on American campuses, funded and staffed largely through national nonprofit organizations rather than by campus chapters themselves
Position holding that political authority should be ordered to the Catholic Church's spiritual authority, argued in academic and journal writing rather than through organizing
Political current holding that the United States is and should be a Christian nation, measured in survey research as a set of positions on the relationship between Christianity and American identity
Strand of climate advocacy that frames climate policy as a question of equity and distribution, associated in the United States with youth organizing and the Green New Deal
Long-running American political movement built on a network of media institutions, think tanks and advocacy organizations, which moved from print and broadcast to digital distribution
Online communities that collaboratively develop and circulate alternative explanations for political events, forming an infrastructure that outlasts any individual theory
Advocacy sector working on electoral system design, voting access and election administration, composed of long-established research and campaigning organizations
The established environmental advocacy sector — large membership organizations and foundations working through litigation, lobbying and campaigning — as distinct from the youth climate mobilizations covered separately
Feminist organizing conducted through social media — hashtag campaigns, public testimony and networked support — and the harassment that has consistently accompanied it
Alliance of civil society organizations campaigning on surveillance, encryption, net neutrality and copyright enforcement, working through litigation, legislative advocacy and mass online mobilization
Online ecosystem of socialist-oriented media, communities and small-dollar fundraising that formed around the Sanders campaigns and operates largely outside any single organization
Label for a strand of left political podcasting that rejected respectability norms in favour of profane, comedic commentary, funded directly by listener subscription
Position that dominant platforms should not moderate lawful speech, arguing that private moderation decisions now function like censorship because of the platforms' scale
Effort to build social media services branded around minimal content moderation — the social-media subset of the wider alt-tech effort, and largely the same subject
Online campaign originating in video game culture in 2014, conducted largely through a hashtag, and studied since as a case in networked harassment and platform governance
Conspiracy theory holding that political elites are deliberately changing a country's demographic composition through immigration to displace its existing population, named after a 2011 book by Renaud Camus
Online movement organized around Nick Fuentes's "America First" livestream, known for coordinated question-and-answer confrontations at mainstream conservative campus events and for a parallel annual conference
Youth-led movement for gun law reform formed after the February 2018 Parkland shooting, organized through paired advocacy and political entities
Use of computer intrusion and digital disruption as political protest — website defacement, denial-of-service campaigns and the publication of obtained documents
Online communities organized around an identity of involuntary celibacy, forum-centred and repeatedly displaced from mainstream platforms, and studied for their connection to acts of violence
Informal network of commentators and academics who built audiences through long-form podcasts and video in the late 2010s, named in 2018 and largely dissolved as a grouping thereafter
Politics organized around economic inequality and opposition to concentrated wealth, running from the 2011 Occupy encampments through the Sanders primary campaigns
Network of political livestreamers broadcasting commentary, debate and election coverage on Twitch and YouTube, distinguished from video-essay channels by live format and real-time audience interaction
Political movement organized around limiting the scope of government, operating through a minor party, a research institution network and independent media
Political movement organized around Donald Trump's candidacies and the "Make America Great Again" slogan, which combined rally organizing with direct social media communication
Loose network of online communities organized around masculinity and men's issues, comprising pickup-artist, men's rights, MGTOW and incel spaces linked by shared forums, vocabulary and audiences
Advocacy movement focused on family law, custody, domestic violence policy and educational outcomes as they affect men, with roots in 1970s fathers' rights organizing and a later online presence
Armed private groups organized around opposition to federal authority, ranging from local field-training organizations to national networks, some of whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy over January 6, 2021
Networks organizing online since the mid-1990s around neo-Nazi and white supremacist politics, characterized by forum-based community, repeated removal from platforms and migration to new infrastructure
Early internet-based political organizing on the American left, built on blogs, email lists and small-dollar online fundraising, whose fundraising infrastructure long outlived the blogs
Republican and former-Republican opposition to Donald Trump's candidacies and presidency, organized largely through independent media ventures and political committees rather than party structures
Digital organizing operation built for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, assembled from staff and tools developed in earlier campaigns
Encampment-based protest movement against economic inequality, beginning in Lower Manhattan in September 2011, that coordinated and documented itself through social media and livestreaming
Online community built around scientific skepticism and atheist advocacy in the mid-2000s, which fragmented over disputes about its own scope
Broad mobilization of internet users, online communities and technology companies against copyright-enforcement legislation and for network neutrality rules
Conspiracy theory constructed on 4chan in November 2016 alleging a child-abuse ring run from a Washington, D.C. restaurant, which spread to Reddit and Twitter and led to an armed incident at the restaurant
Intellectual current arguing that liberalism has failed on its own terms, circulated through books, journals and academic argument rather than through organizing
The two opposing advocacy movements in the United States over Israel and Palestine, whose relative standing in American public opinion has shifted measurably since October 2023
Decentralized online communities supporting Donald Trump through meme production, hashtag campaigns and rally coordination — largely the same subject as the MAGA movement page
Conspiracy movement that began with anonymous imageboard posts in October 2017 and spread through mainstream social platforms and alternative sites
Political movement organizing religious constituencies around family, education and social policy, operating through national advocacy organizations paired with affiliated lobbying arms
The two opposing movements over abortion law in the United States, whose central legal question was returned to the states by the Supreme Court in 2022
Politics defined by opposition to established political institutions from the right, running from the 2009 Tea Party through subsequent primary insurgencies
Loosely affiliated anti-government movement holding that United States government authority does not lawfully apply to its adherents, known for filing pseudolegal claims and for confrontations with law enforcement
Campaign asserting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, organized through rallies and social media, whose Washington events preceded the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol
Movement organized from 2009 around opposition to federal spending, taxation and the mortgage relief programs of that year, combining local groups with national organizing and Republican primary campaigns
Loose network of groups and campaigns opposing the first Trump administration, formed after the November 2016 election and organized largely through local chapters and online coordination
Movement of TikTok users organizing against the U.S. divest-or-ban law and migrating to alternative platforms in response to it
Advocacy movement seeking legal protections and healthcare access for transgender people, organized through litigation, legislative campaigns and online community and visibility work