From Protest to Polarization: A Collaborative Study of the Reopen Movement

Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age: The Reopen Movement, published by Cambridge University Press, examines how social movements emerge, evolve, and radicalize in an era shaped by social media and digital infrastructure. The book is the result of a deeply collaborative, interdisciplinary effort between Boston University faculty and alumni. Together, they combine political science, data science, and computational analysis to offer a nuanced account of the “Reopen” movement during the COVID‑19 pandemic.

Co-authors include Pardee’s own Professor Jeremy Menchik and Clara Martiny (BA IR ’21) as well as several Boston University affiliates such as Dr. Gianluca Stringhini, Associate Professor at the College of Engineering; Dr. Samuel Bazzi, Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS); Pujan Puadel, Doctorate Recipient in Computer Engineering; and Seth Soderborg, SNS Analytics.

What motivated you to study the “Reopen” movement, and why did you see it as an important case for understanding mass mobilization in the digital age?

Menchik: Social media is omnipresent for contemporary politics, whether that’s Donald Trump on Truth Social, Tucker Carlson’s podcast, or Ms. Rachel on Instagram. We wanted to understand how social movements develop, grow, change, and die in the digital age. In-person protests are no longer the default option for mass mobilization, and we wanted to understand how digital tools transform the origins, evolution, and impact of social movements. 

Your research challenges the idea that the Reopen movement was purely elite-driven or “AstroTurf.” What did your findings reveal about bottom-up participation?

Menchik: A lot of contemporary right-wing movements like the Tea Party and the Reopen movement are backed by powerful elite institutions such as the Koch Brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council. We wanted to understand elite influence on social movements. What we found was that elites are influential in creating social movements but that digital infrastructure like Facebook is impossible for elites to control completely, even with bots and paid influencers. Instead, large numbers of everyday people can shape the issues and priorities of mass movements. 

How did a largely nonpartisan protest movement evolve, and radicalize, over the course of the pandemic? How has this changed since most people have gone “back to office”?

Martiny: The movement started as a largely nonpartisan response to a shared problem — lockdowns and COVID-19 disrupting people’s lives and spreading uncertainty and fear. But it changed as that issue faded and states started to reopen. The original goal of the movement was technically achieved, and that created spaces for new agendas, especially national politics and the 2020 election. At the same time, more moderate participants dropped out of the groups, paving the way for more partisan or extreme voices to stay or join, pushing the movement into a direction more aligned with Trump’s agenda. The online networks we studied didn’t just disappear as people returned to “normal life.” The networks were repurposed for new causes. Some of the people we studied back then are still active today as political influencers, local politicians, or are still facing legal fallout from having participated in the January 6 Capitol riots!

How does your study change how scholars should think about misinformation, online echo chambers, and political polarization?

Martiny: Our study shows that misinformation, echo chambers, and polarization aren’t baked into the Internet. These problems develop over time as online social movements grow, and social media platforms like Facebook can accelerate that process. Misinformation, for example, wasn’t the main reason people initially joined these groups, but it was part of the reason people stayed: it became more partisan and conspiratorial with the arrival of QAnon ideologies. Early on, the groups we studied were also more heterogeneous and not advanced echo chambers, and over time fragmentation and moderation pressures sorted users into more ideologically consistent spaces. In that sense, polarization is something that develops through movement dynamics, not something that structures them from the outset. 

What broader lessons does this case offer for policymakers and public health officials responding to future crises?

Stringhini: This book shows that social media does not only shape online discourse, but it can also be the breeding ground for movements that spill into the real world, giving rise to societal effects. This is an opportunity for policymakers and health officials, as online discourse can be used to identify emerging topics and ideas that might have public safety implications (think of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016 or of the various false cures for COVID that emerged during the pandemic).

What do you hope students and readers ultimately take away from this book?

Menchik: This book should inspire students to get involved in research! Their UROP projects can turn into books. Clara Martiny’s senior thesis on the Reopen movement helped to birth this book, and helped launch Clara’s career including jobs at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Alethea, and a MA from Oxford University. 

Beyond research, we hope that readers will see the power of social movements, as well as the need for analogue tactics in a digital age. We need social movements for democracy, against climate change, and for global governance. That will take mass mobilization, and we hope that the next generation of leaders draw lessons from our book on how to make their social movements more effective in an age of digital distraction and social polarization. 

To learn more about this new book, click here.

Martiny’s presentation “The Reopen Movement” for the Oxford Internet Institute can be watched here.

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