As part of a campaign at Picturehouse Cinemas in the UK, workers experimented with a new form of digital activism. As Kelly Rogers, one of the organizers, explained, “We are going to start pushing cyberpickets … where supportive members of the public who can't come down to a picket line spend their day block booking seats and keeping them in the online basket, so they can't be sold on tills or online.” She argued that this “makes the strike much more effective when they keep cinemas open on strike days – and Hackney had managed to keep their cinema pretty much empty this way!” (quoted in Caramazza, 2019). In response, the Picturehouse sacked Rogers. She fought this later and was found to have been unfairly dismissed.

In a particularly amusing blog post from an employment law solicitor, Toby Porchon (2019), who provides legal advice to businesses, he warns of the risks of ‘cyber picketing’. He argues that it ‘ha[s] the potential to be vastly more detrimental than simply calling for a boycott. Or even standing in front of their premises so members of the public [can] make their own decisions about which business they choose to support.’ He observes that ‘this practice would have prevented unaware customers from being able to make bookings without ever knowing why.’ Equally, in the case of Picturehouse, it meant the cinema could have been open and operating with full staff but without customers ‘coming through the door’. To this end, he notes that ‘the cyber picket could have happened at any time without anyone really knowing when. Such is the nature of a remote or diffuse style of disruption.’ However, he also points to some advantages this type of digital activism may hold for workers. As Porchon explains: ‘At least with a strike the employer has the ability to not pay staff who aren't providing services. And they’d have been forewarned their operations were going to be undermined on a set day, for a set purpose.’