The digital evolution of occupy wall street

Abstract

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.

Figure 1. Total number of tweets related to Occupy Wall Street between September 2011 and September 2012.

Each timestep represents a 12-hour period, with vertical blue bars overlaid on periods during which access to the Twitter streaming API was interrupted. Large bursts in activity tend to correspond to protest or police action on the ground, demarcated with circles. From left to right, the events are: initial Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park; initial NYPD arrests of protesters; march from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park; protest at U.S. Armed Forces recruiting station in Times Square; protest in support of Iraq veteran injured by police-fired projectile; NYPD action to clear Zuccotti Park; protest against eviction from Zuccotti Park; first round of Egyptian elections; ‘May Day’ general strike and planned reoccupation of former encampments.

Figure 2. Attention allocation of 25,000 randomly selected Occupy users to each of three topics: Occupy Wall Street, domestic politics, and revolutionary social movements.

Engaged User Ratio describes the proportion of active users in each timestep who produced at least one topically-relevant tweet. Engaged User Attention Ratio describes, among these users, the share of average attention allocated to each topic. The Engaged User Attention Ratio did not exhibit meaningful trends for either domestic politics or foreign social movements, and so it is omitted from the figure for sake of visual clarity. Refer to Results for the full derivation of these measures. The dashed vertical line corresponds to the date of the first Occupy protest.

Figure 3. Proportion of all retweet and mention traffic, regardless of content, from 25,000 randomly selected Occupy users involving another individual who produced at least one Occupy-related tweet.

Shown are means and 95% confidence intervals for each time step. The dashed vertical line corresponds to the date of the first Occupy protest.