For better or for worse, I tend to be a "data first" researcher, but as I've spent time with these data over the past 8 months or so, and especially over the past few weeks, I have come around to a theoretical or conceptual argument that I believe they make.

Last year, Paul Seabright (a British economist at the University of Toulouse), published a book on the economics of religion where he makes a really interesting argument, that we can understand religious movements as platforms, which he defines as "organizations that facilitate relationships."

This metaphor immediately stood out to me as an internet researcher, because we use the term platform all the dang time. In fact, I think this is one of the strengths of Seabright's comparison...

... he wants to explore how religions function in a similar fashion to social media platforms. That's interesting, especially for someone who studies religion and social media platforms. This metaphor is also useful in that it draws attention...

... to the mediating power of religions in social activity, in the same way that an internet researcher might ask how Bluesky or Facebook mediates social activity. So, I think Seabright is onto something here with this metaphor. That said, I also have some quibbles with how he's using the metaphor. In particular...

... it seems to me that Seabright blurs the boundaries between a platform (that is, infrastructure) and a community (that is, a social group engaging in social activity).

In some contexts, it may be appropriate to speak of those as the same thing: For example, when Levi presents later in this session on the LDS Freedom Forum, I think we can talk about that forum both as infrastructure and as a community, with a Venn diagram that's very nearly a circle.

However, before that, we're going to hear from Spencer Stewart, who's going to demonstrate that there are multiple, even competing Mormon communities based on the YouTube infrastructure—and that's before we even get to the much larger and more mainstream communities that also exist within that infrastructure. Furthermore, I'd guess that some of the communities Spencer is going to talk about also exist on other platforms, not just YouTube.

So, while I think it's interesting to talk about a religious institution as providing the same kind of social infrastructure as a platform like YouTube, I think we need to acknowledge a plurality of platforms, a plurality of communities, and complex intersections between the two.

In short, while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have provided the original infrastructure for Mormonism, Mormonism is a social phenomenon that also exists in other infrastructures (from Sunstone to TikTok), and there are multiple Mormonisms that exist within any of those platforms, including the Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical infrastructure.

So, in this presentation, I want to talk specifically about some Mormons' efforts to extend their community's reach to a particular set of platforms.

I am describing these as "right-wing" social media platforms, though they would more likely describe themselves as "free speech" platforms. In short, all social media platforms must engage in a certain amount of content moderation, the prohibition, removal, or discouraging of certain kinds of content on a platform. These platforms frame content moderation as a kind of censorship and portray themselves as bastions of free speech on the internet. We can trace the history of these right-wing platforms through the last three U.S. presidential elections.

First, concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election put mainstream platforms on the defensive, leading to an increase in content moderation. U.S. conservatives complained about this response, and we saw the emergence of platforms like Gab and Parler in the following years.

Second, the 2020 elections saw social media platforms responding to misinformation about COVID-19 and false claims about election results. During and after the January 6th Capitol riots, platforms took steps to respond to activity that could be understood as calls for political violence. This led to aggressive content moderation and, as we'll see, increased attention to right-wing platforms on the part of disaffected conservatives. After being kicked off of Twitter, Donald Trump also launched his own social media platform, joining the ecosystem of right-wing platforms; Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022 also pushed a once-mainstream platform in the direction of that same ecosystem.

While not directly related to this research, it's also important to point out the dramatic changes that we've seen since the 2024 elections, as mainstream platforms have retreated from aggressive content moderation to avoid retribution from or curry favor with the second Trump administration.

In this study, I'm focusing on just two platforms, the Facebook-like Gab, which I would describe as not just "right-wing" but "far-right," and the YouTube-like Rumble, where you have everything from Senator Rand Paul to the White House to white nationalist Nick Fuentes. To make these platforms as comparable as possible, I focused on groups on Gab and channels on Rumble.

This leaves out some platforms I really would have like to investigate as well, including the Twitter clone Parler, the messaging app Telegram, and Donald Trump's own Truth Social. However, there were practical and ethical barriers that I would need to resolve before extending my research in this direction.

So, what did I do with these platforms?

Well, I used three different search terms (Mormon, Latter-day Saint, and LDS) to try to find Mormon content on both platforms. These search terms delivered results in either the titles or the descriptions of groups or channels. This occasionally lead to obviously irrelevant results (I got a number of Rumble channels that used the acronym "LD" and then had the letter "S" somewhere else), which I have removed. Also, different search terms sometimes turned up the same group or channel, so I removed any such duplicates.

This resulted in 47 groups on Gab and 33 channels on Rumble.

Of course, not all groups or channels that use the word "Mormon" use it in the same way, so one of the first things I did was to sort them into mutually exclusive categories.

For most of this presentation, I'm going to focus on three broad categories, which I'll describe as "uncritical of Mormonism," grouping 51 groups and channels, "critical of Mormonism," grouping 22 groups and channels and "unclear," which is made up of 7 groups and channels that reference Mormonism only ambiguously.

These broad categories already tell us something about Mormons' efforts to extend Mormonism to platforms like Rumble and Gab. They're persistent! 51 generally pro-Mormon groups and channels isn't really a lot compared to mainstream platforms like Facebook and YouTube, but it does suggest multiple attempts at establishing a Mormon presence on these platforms, especially considering how redundant many of these groups are, using similar names and titles.

In fact, we get a sense of that if we look at my original categories, which add up to eleven of different sizes, ranging from 3 Rumble channels that posted Mormon content, such as the 2002 film The Singles Ward to 18 Gab groups and Rumble channels that were explicitly critical of Mormonism in one way or another.

I also want to specify that I used the category of "Mormon Fundamentalism" in a deliberately broader sense than just polygamist movements: While there was some of this, including a Rumble channel dedicated to posting recordings of lessons taught by Warren Jeffs, this category also included groups and channels that were fundamentalist in other senses, such as privileging early Mormonism over the contemporary practices and teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I'm happy to answer other questions about these categories, and I have slides and examples for all of them that I'm happy to show, but to keep our focus on Mormonism as a community that exists—or tries to exist—on multiple platforms, I want to stick to the three broader ones I introduced earlier.

In fact, that simpler approach will make it easier for us to evaluate how Mormonism is doing on Gab and Rumble.

Let's begin by looking at the history of these groups' creation. There are two that were created in late 2019: One is focused on the Book of Mormon, and the other distinguishes itself from Mormonism while stopping short of being explicitly critical. Unsurprisingly, we see our peak of activity in late 2020 and early 2021, fitting with the history that I described earlier. It sure seems like there's an influx of Mormons on these platforms alongside other U.S. conservatives, but that excitement doesn't last, and starting in 2022-2023, Mormon excitement for the platform starts to die down, and it seems like those channels and groups that continue to appear tend to focus more on criticism of Mormonism.

In fact, if we look at the average creation date for these groups and channels, critical ones tend to be more recent than uncritical ones, though it's hard to know how much to read into that. We also need to acknowledge that the creation date doesn't tell us a lot by itself. So, let's look at the number of weeks since each group or channel has been active, based on comparing the date I collected data and the date of last activity on the group or channel.

There's an interesting bimodal distribution here, though I confess that's partially a result of using the default number of data "bins" for a histogram. The second highest peak is made up of 13 groups and channels that have been inactive for just over 200 weeks; since my data collection took place in March of this year, 200 weeks works out to late 2020/early 2021, where we saw that peak of activity related to creation of new groups. So, there was some excitement when Gab and Rumble were in the news, but a bunch of those Mormon-related groups never really took off.

The highest peak, though, is right around 0 weeks, which tells us that there are a certain number of groups and channels that are active to this day, though this plot doesn't take creation time into account.

It does seem that groups and channels critical of Mormonism are, on average, active more recently than uncritical or unclear groups, though 79 weeks ago is not exactly fresh content. (This does appear to be a significant difference when comparing just critical and uncritical groups).

As interesting as these data are, I mentioned earlier that recency of activity doesn't take creation date into account, so I want to briefly look at the total window of activity between a group or channel's creation and its most recent activity.

This really doesn't tell us a whole lot more than what we already know, which is that many of these groups don't see a lot of activity before fading away. It's important, though, to point out that this kind of long tail pattern is widely observed on the internet, so we shouldn't jump to too many conclusions about the nature of Mormon groups or obscure platforms.

That said, it is worth pointing out that groups and channels critical of Mormonism seem to last longer than other categories, though this does not appear to be a significant difference.

Let's take a look at one final metric that may be interesting here, which is the number of people who have joined a group or subscribed to a channel related to Mormonism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most groups and channels hover right around the 0 count, though again, long tail patterns like this one are really really common with internet data, so we shouldn't jump to wild conclusions. There are a few interesting outliers, though.

Out at the far-right, pun fully intended, is the Gab group /rel/, presumably short for "religion" and asserting some kind of connection to the infamous 4chan message board.

We also have two groups uncritical of Mormonism with more than 500 followers apiece. Both are Rumble channels, one named "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" whose only video is a copy of the 2005 film Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration, and the other named "LDS Conservative," which posts videos featuring Joel Skousen (nephew of right-wing activist Cleon Skousen—and Royal's brother).

Again, looking at averages, we see some differences here: Our small unclear category seems to do the best, largely because of the large Gab group I mentioned on the last slide. On one hand, uncritical groups seem to have higher average followings than critical groups, but a comparison of means suggests that this is not a significant difference.

So, what should we conclude from these data?

I began this presentation by suggesting that Seabright's metaphor of "religion as platform" was interesting but oversimplified in that it overlooked the way that religions might exist online as a plurality of communities spread between a plurality of platforms.

I don't think it takes much to show how these data support the idea of a plurality of communities. Even within explicit (or at least strongly implicit) right-wing spaces, there are multiple approaches to Mormonism here, with contrasts between pro- and anti-Mormon stances as well as mainstream and fundamentalist approaches to the religion. What I'm more interested in, though, is the efforts of these Mormon subcommunities to implant themselves on these particular platforms. As we've seen in our results...

... these efforts are persistent, with 51 pro-Mormon groups trying to establish a Mormon presence on right-wing platforms. Yet, 22 groups explicitly critical of Mormonism is also an indication of resistance to Mormon compatibility with Gab and Rumble.

What's more, it's pretty clear that not all attempts to establish a Mormon foothold in these right-wing platforms were really successful.

So, how do these platforms and these communities intersect with each other? More in-depth research is needed to truly answer this question, but I think these data suggest that Mormonism and right-wing platforms don't converge as easily as Mormonism and mainstream platforms—or as right-wing platforms and other conservative Christian movements.

It's hard to say how much of this is due to the nature of right-wing platforms (which don't benefit from the network effects and familiarity of more well-known platforms), to the nature of Mormonism (which is not fully accepted by the American religious right), or to other factors that these data don't account for. Whatever the details,