April 24, 12 p.m.
820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
In recent years, journalists and scholars alike have observed a “right turn” in Silicon Valley. In fact, this “turn” is neither an anomaly, nor a recent development, argues Becca Lewis, an expert on disinformation and far-right digital media.
Join us at BESI as Lewis recounts how right-wing politics came to Silicon Valley decades before Elon Musk began running DOGE. She focuses 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 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, she shows how these groups’ efforts brought conservatism into the Information Age — and how they enlisted Silicon Valley in the broader right-wing political project.
About the Speaker
Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and an incoming assistant professor of comparative media studies at MIT. In September 2024, she received her Ph.D. 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 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.