Wilson, who had attended political protests in the past but had never been involved in organizing them, joined the group’s Discord channel to help plan.
“Not even in my wildest dreams did I think that my first protest that I organized with another group of Pennsylvanians would have 200 people show up,” Wilson tells WIRED. “Then the next one, I think we had 300 or 400, so I’m optimistic right now. The trick will be to keep this energy going.”
Like Wilson, many of the 311,000 subscribers to the subreddit and the 17,000 members of the group’s Discord have no experience in organizing protests. Still, they felt they had to.
“Democracy needs to be defended, and it’s up to us as community members to stand up and do that work, because no one else will do it for us,” Wilson says.
The 50501 group also uses a wide variety of other online platforms to coordinate their efforts, including encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Matrix, which smaller subgroups use for sensitive conversations. Platforms like Mobilize.us allow participants to share information about upcoming protests, while state-level groups come up with ideas for signs and chants on shared Google Docs.
“Everybody’s kind of using different strategies to communicate, so it’s all over the place,” says TJ Demetriou, the public affairs officer for a 50501 subgroup for veterans. “If you’re involved in a couple different groups, it can be confusing.”
Discord is the primary platform for planning and assigning volunteer positions within local groups, but it also serves as a place for the community to vent. Following the group’s protests on March 4, many of the members gathered on the group’s Discord server to watch Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress.
The “general chat” channel was quickly filled with anger, not at what Trump was saying but at the response from the Democrats in the chamber, who had decided the best way to confront Trump was to wear pink blouses and hold up tiny signs that no one could see.
“I kid you not, they are holding signs instead of booing,” one member wrote incredulously. “Bunch of spineless fucks,” another added, after no other Democrat came to the defense of representative Al Green of Texas, who was removed from the chamber for heckling Trump.
“Well I’m glad YOU all are protesting because holy shit that was a weak showing from dems with their bitch=ass [sic] paddles and pink shirts and blue ties,” another member wrote.
Though the group has had a lot of successes, some infighting has unfortunately become a distraction.
In April, the person who posted the original 50501 post, known online as Evolved Fungi, locked down the subreddit entirely, claiming that some national groups were seeking to take control of the 50501 group for their own ends. According to a since-deleted post on Reddit, Fungi believed someone had sought to file trademark applications for the 50501 name. A member of the 50501 leadership group subsequently claimed in a Reddit post that there was an attempt to trademark the name and create a 501c4 entity, but that this was done by “a separate, independent group of three people wholly unconnected to the broader 50501 group.
