This qualitative social media framing analysis captures the discursive engagement with COVID-19 in Fridays for Future's (FFF) digital protest communication on Facebook. In offering comparative insights from 457 posts across 29 public pages from FFF collectives in the European Union, this study offers the first analysis of social movement frames employed by FFF during the pandemic. By coding all Corona-related messages across collectives, we chart three framing processes: adaptation (compliance, solidarity), reframing (reclaiming the crisis, nexus between climate and health), and mobilization (sustained involvement, digital protest alternatives). We discuss our findings alongside social movement framing theory, including frame bridging and scope enlargement to accommodate the pandemic topicality into FFF's environmental master frame, and frame development by FFF movement leaders. This study thus provides key insights into discursive shifts in social movements brought on by external crises that threaten to marginalize the cause and demobilize adherents.

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Drawing on walking interviews with 19 Fridays for Future (FFF) activists in Germany, this study focuses on Greta Thunberg by researching strikers’ perception, identification, and online networking practices with the movement’s central figure. With respect to protest mobilization and collective identity formation, this study finds that participants primarily identify with Thunberg via her class standing. While male activists highlight Thunberg’s gender as a mobilizing factor, female and non-binary activists often dismiss it, thereby distancing themselves from FFF’s feminized public image. Participants believe that Thunberg’s disability gives her an “edge” to generate media attention for FFF, calling it an asset to the cause. Although all participants engage with Thunberg via social media, many downplay her leadership role in the movement. Similarly, local organizers actively use Thunberg’s posts to build up their own online networks while routinely emphasizing FFF’s leaderlessness. The findings thus nuance assumptions about identity-based mobilization, explore the construction of networked leadership, and chart digital organizing practices in a transnational youth climate movement.

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This themed issue provides an international perspective on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows, this themed issue foregrounds the interplay between the global and local in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. In this Introduction, we ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what "transnational" means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist practice. After providing an overview of the different theoretical insights that an interdisciplinary approach to digital activism can provide, we outline a conceptual framework for approaching the transnational as an entanglement of flows, hierarchies, and agencies.