Tech’s Right Turn: The Rise of Reactionary Politics in Silicon Valley and Online

Becca Lewis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. She researches how right-wing movements gained power in Silicon Valley and online, and how they shaped our current information systems. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim. She holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA in Film Studies from Columbia University.

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Abstract: In recent years, journalists and scholars alike have observed a “right turn” in Silicon Valley and online. In fact, this “turn” is neither an anomaly, nor a recent development. In this talk, I show how groups with reactionary social goals have long harnessed emerging digital information technologies towards ideological ends. I focus on a group of conservative activists who brought their ideas to bear on Silicon Valley and its digital technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. Operating primarily within a loose network of think tanks and media publications, these activists embraced the world of high technology as a space for building right-wing power and a vehicle for restoring older social orders. Ultimately, I show how these groups’ efforts brought conservatism into the Information Age—and how they helped shape our contemporary information systems.