The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street

We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the movement's first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements. These users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the birth of the movement, appear to have lost interest in Occupy related communication over the remainder of the study period.Comment: Open access available at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.006467

Occupy Wall Street: The movement in its third anniversary

Peer-reviewedThe emergence of networked social movements in 2011 has opened a new door in the social movements' literature. By adopting a technopolitical and situated approach, in this paper, we explore the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement three years after its formation in September 2011. Through an online survey and a nonprobabilistic sampling procedure, we pay special attention to the perceptions and opinions of the movement's participants. We distinguish seven thematic sections: the relationship with the movement, previous political participation and motivations, the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the emotions experienced, the evolution of the movement, its influence on institutional politics, and its impacts on several aspects of social life. The results show that the respondents (N=522) are overall adherent to the movement and that the majority participated at some point. Most think that the movement still exists in one way or another, and perceive its impact on several areas, institutions, behaviours, and ideas. We conclude by describing OWS as a case that adequately fits the concept of a networked social movement. Finally, we suggest further developments in the understanding of these movements by further applying the online survey designed for this study and complementing analyses via other research methods.La aparición de los movimientos sociales en red en 2011 ha abierto una nueva puerta en la literatura de los movimientos sociales. Al adoptar un enfoque tecnopolítico y situado, en este documento, exploramos el caso del movimiento Occupy Wall Street tres años después de su creación en septiembre de 2011. A través de una encuesta en línea y un procedimiento de muestreo no probabilístico, prestamos especial atención a las percepciones y opiniones de los participantes del movimiento. Distinguimos siete secciones temáticas: la relación con el movimiento, la participación y motivaciones políticas previas, el uso de las tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC), las emociones experimentadas, la evolución del movimiento, su influencia en la política institucional y sus impactos en varios aspectos de la vida social. Los resultados muestran que los encuestados (N = 522) se adhieren en general al movimiento y que la mayoría participó en algún momento. La mayoría piensa que el movimiento todavía existe de una forma u otra, y perciben su impacto en varias áreas, instituciones, comportamientos e ideas. Concluimos describiendo OWS como un caso que encaja adecuadamente con el concepto de un movimiento social en red. Finalmente, sugerimos desarrollos adicionales en la comprensión de estos movimientos mediante la aplicación de la encuesta en línea diseñada para este estudio y complementando los análisis a través de otros métodos de investigación.L'aparició dels moviments socials en xarxa en 2011 ha obert una nova porta en la literatura dels moviments socials. En adoptar un enfocament tecnopolítico i situat, en aquest document, explorem el cas del moviment Occupy Wall Street tres anys després de la seva creació al setembre de 2011. A través d'una enquesta en línia i un procediment de mostreig no probabilístic, prestem especial atenció a les percepcions i opinions dels participants del moviment. Distingim set seccions temàtiques: la relació amb el moviment, la participació i motivacions polítiques prèvies, l'ús de les tecnologies d'informació i comunicació (TIC), les emocions experimentades, l'evolució del moviment, la seva influència en la política institucional i els seus impactes en diversos aspectes de la vida social. Els resultats mostren que els enquestats (N = 522) s'adhereixen en general al moviment i que la majoria va participar en algun moment. La majoria pensa que el moviment encara existeix d'una forma o una altra, i perceben el seu impacte a diverses àrees, institucions, comportaments i idees. Concloem descrivint OWS com un cas que encaixa adequadament amb el concepte d'un moviment social en xarxa. Finalment, suggerim desenvolupaments addicionals en la comprensió d'aquests moviments mitjançant l'aplicació de l'enquesta en línia dissenyada per a aquest estudi i complementant les anàlisis a través d'altres mètodes de recerca

The topology of a discussion: the #occupy case

We analyse a large sample of the Twitter activity developed around the social movement 'Occupy Wall Street' to study the complex interactions between the human communication activity and the semantic content of a discussion. We use a network approach based on the analysis of the bipartite graph @Users-#Hashtags and of its projections: the 'semantic network', whose nodes are hashtags, and the 'users interest network', whose nodes are users In the first instance, we find out that discussion topics (#hashtags) present a high heterogeneity, with the distinct role of the communication hubs where most the 'opinion traffic' passes through. In the second case, the self-organization process of users activity leads to the emergence of two classes of communicators: the 'professionals' and the 'amateurs'. Moreover the network presents a strong community structure, based on the differentiation of the semantic topics, and a high level of structural robustness when a certain set of topics are censored and/or accounts are removed. Analysing the characteristics the @Users-#Hashtags network we can distinguish three phases of the discussion about the movement. Each phase corresponds to specific moment of the movement: from declaration of intent, organisation and development and the final phase of political reactions. Each phase is characterised by the presence of specific #hashtags in the discussion. Keywords: Twitter, Network analysisComment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Structural Patterns of the Occupy Movement on Facebook

In this work we study a peculiar example of social organization on Facebook: the Occupy Movement -- i.e., an international protest movement against social and economic inequality organized online at a city level. We consider 179 US Facebook public pages during the time period between September 2011 and February 2013. The dataset includes 618K active users and 753K posts that received about 5.2M likes and 1.1M comments. By labeling user according to their interaction patterns on pages -- e.g., a user is considered to be polarized if she has at least the 95% of her likes on a specific page -- we find that activities are not locally coordinated by geographically close pages, but are driven by pages linked to major US cities that act as hubs within the various groups. Such a pattern is verified even by extracting the backbone structure -- i.e., filtering statistically relevant weight heterogeneities -- for both the pages-reshares and the pages-common users networks

Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval

Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We analyze over 2.3 million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similarity in trends of discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the users involved in this conversation and what roles they played. We study how roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the upheaval. This analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly intertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in individual behavior.Comment: Best Paper Award at ACM Web Science 201

On the Role of Social Identity and Cohesion in Characterizing Online Social Communities

Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual interpersonal attraction as they share common characteristics. These characteristics can range from common interests to kinship ties and from social values to ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, the social identity approach posits that an individual is likely to join a group based on an intrinsic self-evaluation at a cognitive or perceptual level. In other words group members typically share an awareness of a common category membership. In this work we seek to understand the role of these two contrasting theories in explaining the behavior and stability of social communities in Twitter. A specific focal point of our work is to understand the role of these theories in disparate contexts ranging from disaster response to socio-political activism. We extract social identity and social cohesion features-of-interest for large scale datasets of five real-world events and examine the effectiveness of such features in capturing behavioral characteristics and the stability of groups. We also propose a novel measure of social group sustainability based on the divergence in group discussion. Our main findings are: 1) Sharing of social identities (especially physical location) among group members has a positive impact on group sustainability, 2) Structural cohesion (represented by high group density and low average shortest path length) is a strong indicator of group sustainability, and 3) Event characteristics play a role in shaping group sustainability, as social groups in transient events behave differently from groups in events that last longer

Transnational Activism in Support of National Protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

This article considers the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media whilst organizationally remaining localized. It examines a corpus of social media data collected in the course of two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data supplemented with interview findings revealed concerns with protest logistics as common across the transnational networks of protest localities on both Facebook and Twitter, a finding that testified to the coordinated character of the protests. On the other hand, collective identity emerged as the fruit of attempts to surmount localized protest experiences of geographically disparate but civically-minded social media users

Structure and Dynamics of Information Pathways in Online Media

Diffusion of information, spread of rumors and infectious diseases are all instances of stochastic processes that occur over the edges of an underlying network. Many times networks over which contagions spread are unobserved, and such networks are often dynamic and change over time. In this paper, we investigate the problem of inferring dynamic networks based on information diffusion data. We assume there is an unobserved dynamic network that changes over time, while we observe the results of a dynamic process spreading over the edges of the network. The task then is to infer the edges and the dynamics of the underlying network. We develop an on-line algorithm that relies on stochastic convex optimization to efficiently solve the dynamic network inference problem. We apply our algorithm to information diffusion among 3.3 million mainstream media and blog sites and experiment with more than 179 million different pieces of information spreading over the network in a one year period. We study the evolution of information pathways in the online media space and find interesting insights. Information pathways for general recurrent topics are more stable across time than for on-going news events. Clusters of news media sites and blogs often emerge and vanish in matter of days for on-going news events. Major social movements and events involving civil population, such as the Libyan's civil war or Syria's uprise, lead to an increased amount of information pathways among blogs as well as in the overall increase in the network centrality of blogs and social media sites.Comment: To Appear at the 6th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM '13

Revolutionary Ideology in the Information Age: Technology of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

The research presented in this project draws heavily on themes of social justice and human rights. The purpose of this inquiry is twofold. For one, it functions as an SIT Graduate Institute “Capstone,” which meets the graduation requirements for a Master’s degree from the school. Secondly, the function of this project is to provide a space to investigate how the theory and practice of contemporary social change utilizes today’s most powerful non-militaristic technology. The focus of my research is particularly concerned with my own participant observation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which emerged in the United States in late 2011. The body of this document is divided into three sections, corresponding with the research methodology of a qualitative inquiry. Data is first presented in the form of an experiential testimony. This data is then interpreted as themes are extrapolated and framed in terms of how human rights are related to modern technology. Finally, my findings are then analyzed and discussed in terms of two established theoretical frameworks. These frameworks—which are identified as the Dialectical Method and Technological Determinism—represent two vastly different perspectives of how technology evolves. Yet, the data and analysis presented in this project show how these two frameworks arrive at similar conclusions when considered in conjunction with human rights and social change