The Institutional Digital Divide

Abstract

Concerns about a digital divide in U.S. politics that separates those who have and do not have access to technology have persisted for decades. Those concerns are prominent for immigrants and ethnoracial minorities who have tended to participate in politics, in general, and digital politics, in particular, at lower levels than others. Less attention has focused on the role representative nonprofits play in using technology to share political information and whether there is an institutional dimension to the digital divide. This article examines the adoption of social media by immigrantserving nonprofits in the context of mobilization around elections. The findings suggest that responding organizations have adopted social media slowly and that key internal and external factors seem to relate to social media adoption. Hispanic American organizations were the fastest to adopt social media and have continued to be a technology leader. However, certain immigrant communities, especially the Asian American community, have been particularly slow to adopt social media suggesting that a digital divide exists within the population of immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations. These findings can be used by the leaders and managers of nonprofits to inform future decisions about the integration of technology into their operations.

Social Network Analysis of Nonprofits in Disaster Response: The Case of Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

“…Nonprofits are among the institutional users that utilize Twitter to disseminate information and communicate with others. Since the majority of studies have focused on the adoption of Twitter by large nonprofits (e.g., Nah & Saxton, 2013) or by nonprofits serving certain geographical areas (e.g., Campbell et al, 2014) or with certain types of missions such as advocacy and human services (e.g., Guo & Saxton, 2014; Brown, 2015; Young, 2017), there is no data on the overall adoption of Twitter by the nonprofit sector. But the general trend is an increasing number of nonprofits have embraced Twitter over the past decade (Young, 2017).…”

Throw Your Hat in the Ring (of Wikipedia): Exploring Urban-Rural Disparities in Local Politicians' Information Supply

“…Recently, the literature has highlighted the digital divide in political information, as both politicians and citizens harness the Internet for political purposes, especially elections (Elliott and Earl 2018;Brown 2015;Ragnedda and Ruiu 2017). Given these findings, understanding the source of this digital divide in political information has become an important issue.…”