Source-linked AI summary
The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
Michael D. Conover, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini
TL;DR
The paper asks how Occupy Wall Street’s Twitter communication and participants’ behavior evolved over time. Using sampled Twitter streams and a longitudinal analysis of participant activity, interests, and connectivity, it finds that highly connected users were initially vocal but later largely abandoned Occupy-related communication, with only marginal longer-term behavioral changes.
Problem
The paper examines how digital communication activity and participant behavior changed over time during Occupy Wall Street.
Method
The study analyzes a high-volume public Twitter sample and follows Occupy participants across a fifteen-month period using hashtag activity, attention allocation, and social connectivity measures.
Results
Occupy-related Twitter activity diminished sharply, while participants showed only marginal changes in attention allocation and social connectivity.
Takeaways & Limitations
Occupy Twitter participation came mainly from highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements, whose Occupy communication later declined.
Takeaways & Limitations
The analysis excludes Occupy-related tweets without Occupy-specific hashtags and experienced fifteen days of Twitter API outages.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
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.
Introduction
The paper examines how Twitter supported Occupy Wall Street’s communication and how participation changed over time. It finds sharply diminished activity and limited longer-term changes among highly connected participants.
- Introduction: Twitter helped Occupy participants exchange information supporting resource mobilization and collective framing.The platform connected individuals while facilitating shared language, purpose, and identity.
- Introduction: Occupy-related Twitter traffic diminished by orders of magnitude after peaking in late 2011.Activity returned to baseline within a week of the May 1, 2012 reoccupation efforts.
- Introduction: A random sample of 25,000 users was analyzed for changes in attention allocation and social connectivity.The study covers a fifteen-month period beginning three months before the movement’s first protest action.
- Introduction: Occupy attracted highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements.These users were especially vocal immediately after the movement began but later reduced Occupy-related communication.
Materials and Methods
The study reconstructs Occupy-related Twitter activity and participant behavior from sampled public streams, focusing on hashtag-based communication and changes across time. Its measurements are based on relative stream composition despite intermittent collection outages.
- Materials and Methods: Twitter hashtags aggregate messages into public, topic-specific streams beyond an individual user’s immediate follower network.This enables engagement with topically cohesive communities unconstrained by ordinary social-network structure.
- Materials and Methods: The datasets cover fifteen months of Twitter activity from an approximately 5–10% sample of the public stream.Timestamp metadata support historical reconstruction of the study’s time series.
- Materials and Methods: Occupy-related content was identified using hashtags matching #ows or #occupy*.This includes general and location-specific Occupy hashtags, but excludes content without an Occupy-specific hashtag.
- Materials and Methods: The individual-level analysis followed 25,000 randomly sampled users who had produced at least one Occupy-corpus tweet.All tweets from these accounts during the study period were collected to compare behavior before, during, and after the movement’s main activity.
- Materials and Methods: Attention allocation was compared across Occupy, foreign social-movement, and domestic-political hashtag sets.Analyses used time bins of 12 hours, 24 hours, or one week.
- Materials and Methods: Fifteen days of Twitter API outages affected collection, but the authors state that relative-composition measures were not unduly influenced.The limitation concerns data collection rather than the relative statistical character of the reported measures.
Results
Occupy-related Twitter activity peaked soon after the initial protests and then declined sharply, while participants’ topic interests and social connectivity changed only modestly over the study period.
- 80.8%: Average Occupy traffic decreased by 80.8% in the second half of the study period relative to the first half.Traffic peaked during the month following the initial protests and remained significantly lower over the following eleven months.
- The attention-allocation analysis measured each topic’s engaged user ratio and the average share of tagging activity devoted to that topic.The measures were applied to a random sample of 25,000 users across Occupy, domestic politics, and foreign social movements.
- More than 40% of sampled users allocated 64% of their average attention to Occupy during the third week after the initial protests.The engaged user ratio later declined to less than 5% during the final three months.
- Domestic political engagement rose slightly from 0.066 to 0.077, while foreign-social-movement engagement fell from 0.074 to 0.057 between the study’s first and last twelve weeks.Both differences were statistically significant, but the authors characterize them as small and suggest limited behavioral change.
- In-group retweets increased 5.1% and mentions 3.2% from the pre-movement period to the study’s close, despite declining from peak-period levels toward pre-Occupy values.These changes were statistically significant but small, indicating only marginal changes in social connectivity.
Discussion
Occupy users showed only modest long-term changes in political attention and social connectivity, despite heightened interaction during the movement’s peak. Their communication activity later declined substantially, although this does not by itself demonstrate that the movement failed.
- Slightly increased attention to domestic politics and slightly decreased attention to foreign social movements produced an underwhelming long-term effect.
- In-group retweet and mention activity increased significantly during Occupy’s peak but gradually returned toward pre-movement levels.
- More than a quarter of directed communication already involved future Occupy-content producers before the initial protests.
- Occupy attracted highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements, but their Occupy-related communication later declined.
- The observed communication decline should not be interpreted as proof that Occupy itself failed, since the movement may have increased inequality’s prominence in public discourse.