Digital religion scholarship covers exploitation and conflict as seriously as it covers belief and community, because the same platform dynamics that let a religion spread at internet speed can just as easily be turned against one, or turn a sincere practice into a commercial performance. Three documented patterns illustrate the range.
The clearest case of digital activism organized against a religious institution is Project Chanology, the January 2008 campaign the loose hacker collective Anonymous launched against the Church of Scientology after the church tried to have a leaked internal interview with Tom Cruise removed from the internet. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, embedded with Anonymous from that campaign onward, documents viral video, denial-of-service attacks on Scientology's servers and coordinated street protests worldwide, a shape of conflict, purely online in its origin, with no real precedent before networked platforms existed.
A subtler pattern is amplification reshaping a practice from outside with no coordinated attack at all. Scholarship on #WitchTok documents how TikTok's recommendation algorithm rewards whichever witchcraft content performs best for engagement, not necessarily the content most representative of how practitioners actually practice, while the platform simultaneously commercializes the aesthetic through witchcraft-branded merchandise sold beside the instructional videos.
Neither pattern makes platforms straightforwardly good or bad for religion. Both show what the field treats as basic: a platform's incentives, not merely its reach, shape what belief and practice become once they move through it, for better and worse, depending on whose interests the platform rewards that day.