DARPA-funded study: The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1306/1306.5474.pdf

The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
Michael D. Conover
*
, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America

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.

Citation:
Conover MD, Ferrara E, Menczer F, Flammini A (2013) The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street. PLoS ONE 8(5): e64679. doi:10.1371/
journal.pone.0064679
Editor:
Matjaz Perc, University of Maribor, Slovenia
Received
February 12, 2013;
Accepted
April 16, 2013;
Published
May 29, 2013
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise us
ed by anyone for
any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Funding:
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (grant CCF-1101743), the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) (grant W911NF-12-1-0037), and the McDonnell Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests:
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: midconov@indiana.edu

Introduction

Information communications technologies play a crucial role in
the development and persistence of many modern social move-
ments [1–3]. Among these, the American anti-capitalist movement
Occupy Wall Street (‘Occupy’) is remarkable for the prominent
role social media, and in particular Twitter, played in facilitating
communication among its participants [4,5]. Functioning as a
high-visibility forum in which adherents and prospective partic-
ipants could interact and share information, Twitter represented a
valuable resource for supporting the movement’s political and
social objectives. In time, however, activity on the platform
substantially diminished, mirroring the fading prominence of
protest action on the ground. In light of this decline, we seek to
understand more about the population from which Occupy drew
its support, and specifically whether these individuals exhibited
changes in behavior or social connectivity over the course of the
movement’s evolution.

The Twitter platform, like other information communication
technologies, has the potential to confer a number of benefits to
burgeoning social movements [6–8]. Chief among these is the
opportunity to connect individuals in service of the dual goals of
resource mobilization and collective framing [9]. These factors,
well studied in the social sciences literature, are critical to the
success of social movements. Resource mobilization refers to the
process whereby a social movement works to marshal the physical
and technological infrastructure, human resources, and financial
capital necessary to sustain its ongoing activity [10,11]. Collective
framing refers to the social processes whereby movement
participants negotiate the shared language and narrative frames
that help define the movement’s identity and goals [12,13].
In related work [9], we report on evidence that Occupy users
leveraged Twitter to communicate, at the local level, time-sensitive
information about protest and police action. We also find that
users relied on these channels to facilitate interstate communica-
tion relating to the news media and narrative frames such as ‘‘We
are the 99%,’’ suggesting that long-distance communication on
Twitter played a role in the collective framing processes that
imbue social movements with a shared language, purpose and
identity. This evidence indicates that Occupy participants used the
Twitter platform to address critical issues facing any burgeoning
social movement, and that during peak periods these streams were
rich with actionable, relevant information.

To establish the extent of Occupy participant engagement with
Twitter over time, here we study the total amount of Occupy-
related traffic on the platform from September 2011 through
September 2012. With respect to this measure of activity, we find
that Occupy traffic has diminished by orders of magnitude relative
to peak activity volumes in late 2011. This effect is evident even in
concerted attempts to revive the movement’s flagging levels of
engagement, with activity returning to baseline within a week of
May 1st, 2012 reoccupation efforts.

(More at the link. Remember DARPA and their 1.8 gigapixel camera drones?)

DARPA shows off 1.8-gigapixel surveillance drone, can spot a person from 20,000 feet
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12525227

I am very uncomfortable about this. This is spying.