Open/Networked Movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

DPI-665Politics of the Internet

Mar 19, 2012

Open/Networked Political Movements: The Tea Party and

Occupy Wall Street

Strengths and Weaknesses

Micah L. Sifry

Audio: http://bit.ly/H3NLXH

CC-BY-NC-SA

Topics for discussion

• In structural terms, how are the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street similar?

• How do they differ?

• How has the Internet enabled these movements?

• What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Beginnings

• Pre-existing networking (#tcot, Freedom Works)

• Rick Santelli CNBC “rant”

• Local meetings --> local rallies

• Local coordinators start to network

• Fox coverage starts (pre-April 15)

• Pre-existing networking (Wisconsin, NYABC)

• Adbusters “call to Occupy Wall St”

• Local rally becomes a “general assembly”

• Sept 17 occupation at Zuccotti

• First “pepper spray” incident

Growth phase

• Aug 2009 town halls• Sept 12 Glenn Beck

DC rally• Movement growth

peaks• Shift to GOP primary

challenges in 2010 and 2012 pres primary

• Labor/community march on Oct 5, 2011 in NYC

• Occupations spread to hundreds of cities in October

• Crackdown and dispersion by end of November

• Now what??

Tea Party in the news

• Fox News anticipates the news, helping build support for the first April 15, 2009 rallies (Source: Skocpol and Williamson)

Tea Party in the news (cont.)

• The same was true for July 4 and August recess Tea Party events (Source: Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin)

Occupy in the news

• Early coverage was self-generated

• Police clashes were central

OWS: Twitter vs newspapers

Occupy vs Tea Party (news)

• Tea Party boosted by early coverage from Fox News

Occupy growth on Facebook

• Local Occupies rapidly multiply via Facebook

• Initial burst of affiliation levels off

Viral saturation

Role of networking

• Tea Party Patriots relied more on Ning group, weekly calls

• Local TP Meetups• #tcot

• Occupy relied more heavily on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube

• Google Groups• Livestreamers

#tcot

• As of July 2009, Top Conservatives on Twitter were a vibrant interconnected community

Occupy Livestreams

TPP on Ning

• 92,000 active members

TPP on Facebook

• 855,000 likes, but not that many people “talking about” TPP as of now.

Freedom Connector

• 171,000 active participants; still growing.

• More varied base, includes evangelicals, not just TP

The role of e-groups

• FreedomWorks email list goes out to more than 1 million members

• Relationship between Occupy and MoveOn not as close

NYCGA Structure

NYCGA Working groups

OWS on Facebook

What do they have in common?

• Anyone can start a chapter

• No one leader giving orders

• Loose coordination of chapters

• Competition of tactics• Dispersion of

information by social media

• Confusion as to goals

• “Bad apple” problem hard to control

How do they differ?

• Several top-down hubs/lists (Freedom Works, TPP list)

• Close ties to national GOP groups, billionaires

• Mostly law-abiding

• No top-down list • Wary of ties to

Democratic groups, billionaires

• Includes civil disobedience

Core elements of a movement:How well do they do?

• Sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target audiences (“a campaign”)

• A repertoire of shared political actions

• Unity, numbers and commitment