Digital Power Gaps
For two decades, my data has challenged clichés that the internet is utopian or dystopian. Before today’s alarm over misinformation, AI, and democracy, my research revealed an uncomfortable truth: online platforms amplify the power of those who already have it. The result is digital power gaps around content, activism, startups, information, and AI. Across projects I have shown how structural inequalities infuse every ‘new’ digital promise.
My intellectual trajectory began as an independent documentary filmmaker of struggles over labor and land. The Golf War (2000) won 22 festival honors and was purchased by over 200 universities. Supported by Michael Moore, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Puffin Foundation, my films centered marginalized voices, from the U.S. South to the Philippines. As I witness digital technologies emerge at the century’s turn, pundits claimed these tools enabled participatory uses. I decided to pursue graduate work to research the possibilities these tools offered for people to voice their struggles more directly than through a filmmaker.
When I began graduate school at Harvard’s Kennedy School on a Shorenstein Center scholarship in 2006, Time Magazine named ‘You’ Person of the Year, celebrating user-generated content. While many scholars celebrated this as digital democracy, I questioned who that ‘You’ actually was — and wasn’t. I expanded the ‘digital divide’ debate from access to content creation. Analyzing nine years of survey data, I developed the concept of a digital production gap, based on class, race, and gender. This project yielded five publications, including one cited over 600 times that won the UC Berkeley Jaeger Award and an ASA student paper award, and coverage in 16 news stories across print, online, and radio.
I had similar questions about claims made in 2011 when headlines and scholarship were applauding Twitter and Facebook ‘Revolutions,’ as proof of leaderless collective action. As a UC Berkeley doctoral student with an NSF Dissertation Grant and a Javits Fellowship, I did not want to simply cherry-pick successful movements supporting these horizontal claims. Instead, I designed a multi-method study of 34 organizations that showed that top-down, well-resourced, and far-right groups had higher digital engagement than bottom-up, working-class, and left-leaning groups, creating a digital activism gap. My dissertation won a Coiner Award, and my argument crystallized in The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Harvard University Press 2019). In the context of the rise of the far-right’s rise in France, I wrote a new introduction, and Quanto Press (2022) published the French translation (L’illusion de la démocratie numérique).
The book won the ASA’s Charles Tilly Award and an ICA Section’s Outstanding Book Award, and was featured in over 100 media reports, including The New Yorker, WIRED, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Le Monde, CNN, and the BBC. In the International Journal of Press/Politics, Dave Karpf wrote, “… a landmark text for the next generation of researchers. It is empirically rich, theoretically provocative, and a joy to read.” I also published four articles from this research, including one in top-ranked Social Problems.
When I moved to France in 2014 to work as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, the country was in the throngs of digital utopianism with tech startups, with hopes it could disrupt bureaucracy and create egalitarian workplaces. But with most research focused on Silicon Valley, I launched a comparative project in France and the U.S., with AXA Research Fund support.
My forthcoming book on The Startup Gap explores inequality within France’s tech sector. It shows how class, gender, and regional disparities persist despite progressive policies, with the French tech ecosystem dominated by the Parisian elite, echoing Silicon Valley. The Startup Gap argues that regulations alone can level the field and calls for rethinking support for diverse entrepreneurs. I also have two forthcoming co-authored papers on the welfare state’s role in the startup gap and a computational text analysis of pitch contests.
Before the deluge of disinformation research, I had already shown that far-right activists I interviewed (and digitally traced) were more likely to share more disinformation than their left-leaning counterparts. Yet a puzzle has remained: more people believe misinformation than researchers can track consuming — a problem stemming from reliance on public social media data rather than everyday practices. Soon after beginning at Sciences Po in 2018, I became Principal Investigator on two major grants — from the Agence National de la Recherche and the McCourt Foundation grant— and was recognized as a European Research Council finalist for a comparative France–U.S. study. We use an unprecedented multi-method design from the same pool of 8,000 respondents — surveys, diaries, digital tracing, ethnography, and interviews — to analyze how ideology, institutions, and inequality shape everyday information practices, from misinformation to AI-generated content. We have papers on information gaps, including on digital loneliness and on willingness to regulate misinformation.
The current AI frenzy captures digital exuberance and angst, which I am tackling as associate professor at Sciences Po’s Centre for Research on Social Inequalities and chair of a global initiative on AI and Economic Inclusion with the International Panel on the Information Environment. I examine how Generative AI reproduces inequality, given disparities in training data and access, building on my digital production gap conceptualization. We are conducting a systematic review and a meta-analysis to measure AI gaps.
I view public engagement as integral to this research, having written for Le Monde and The Washington Post, and I am a frequent analyst on the international news channel France 24. Across my career — with nearly 2,000 citations, 75 invited talks, and over $1 million in grant funding — I am a leading scholar of digital power gaps — from content production and social movements to startups and AI. These frameworks show how inequalities are not erased with technology but embedded in systems of power, overturning assumptions about equalizers, progressive advantage, or technological novelty. I have consistently been ahead of the curve, showing early that technology is shaped by social hierarchies and amplifies them — a cycle at the heart of democracy’s struggles.
