This presentation is based on a book set to be published in late 2025 with Cambridge University Press investigating the online “Reopen” protest movement against COVID-19 public health shutdowns in the United States. The book, Protest and Radicalisation in the Digital Age: The Reopen Movement, characterises the movement’s origin, growth, and evolution as it interacted with public policies and offline protests, using a mixed-methods approach of digital ethnography and text analyses of an original dataset spanning more than 1.8 million Facebook comments and posts from over 224 thousand online activists.

The presentation will highlight the main findings of the research, which extend existing theories of contentious politics to suggest that movements that fail to maintain their connection to offline organisations are especially prone to mutability, radicalisation, and exhaustion. The findings offer a framework for understanding social movements in the digital age, while updating the classical theory of cycles of contention.

Clara Martiny is an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute researching changing social practices and uses of technology by activists and protestors in the face of hostile governments and increased state surveillance. She previously worked at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) where she researched online hate speech and disinformation and supported ISD’s US policy work. Prior to ISD, Clara worked at media watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA). Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the BBC, and NBC News.