Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements

Abstract

AbstractThe extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by the arrogance of those in power. Social media can potentially change or contribute to the political communication, mobilization, and organization of social movements. To what extent did these three movements use social media in such ways? To answer this question a comparative content analysis of tweets sent during the heydays of each of the campaigns is conducted. The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organization and coordination issues. Furthermore, comparing the actual content of the Twitter information exchanges reveals similarities as well as differences among the three movements, which can be explained by the different national contexts.Keywords: protestsocial movementssocial mediaTwittermobilization AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank the participants of the 2013 ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop 'The Transnational Dimension of Protest: From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street' for their valuable comments, and Stefaan Walgrave for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article. Special thanks go to Anne Weber, Florian Zielbauer and Nikos Karavias for their excellent research assistance. The authors would also like to thank the MZES for its financial support.Notes on contributorsYannis Theocharis is Senior Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. His research interests are in political participation, protest politics, new media, and social capital. [email: [e-mail]]Will Lowe is Senior Researcher at the MZES, University of Mannheim. He is a political methodologist focusing on quantitative political text analysis. [email: [e-mail]]Jan W. van Deth is professor of political science and international comparative social research at the University of Mannheim. He has published widely in the field of political engagement, political culture, and research methodology. [email: [e-mail]]Gema García-Albacete is Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her main research interests are in political behaviour and the development of political attitudes. [email: [e-mail]]Notes1. Van Laer and Van Aelst (Citation2010) introduced a typology that categorizes political action repertoires into 'real' actions, which are supported and facilitated by the internet, and 'virtual' ones that are exclusively internet-based.2. The capacity of articulating specific, nuanced demands in the negotiation process that follows success using internet platforms has been questioned (Lynch, Citation2011); some have even gone as far as to suggest that 'social media politics' are incompatible with representative democracy (Milner, Citation2013).3. Greek banners later declared 'we are now awake' in both Greek and Spanish.4. A regular Discovertext subscription does not provide access to the 'firehose'. This makes it impossible to determine the representativeness of our sample. Loss of tweets may have ranged from 30 to 60%. For a discussion of the representativeness of Twitter data captured without firehose access, see boyd and Crawford (Citation2012).5. Researchers who acquired larger collections of data from the specific movement across a lengthier time span found that #OWS was in fact the most actively used Twitter stream during the protests (Bennett & Segerberg, Citation2013).6. Similar methodologies have been used by Thorson et al. (Citation2013) and Bennett and Segerberg (Citation2013).7. The software was written in Python using the Django framework and backed by an SQLite database from which coding results were constructed and exported for analyses The software has been used in other Twitter coding projects and is available on request. An open source version will be made available to the academic community after publication.8. An online appendix that includes the descriptives for all tweet categories (Tables A1–A4), the project's codebook, and descriptions of software we used are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26792.9. Here we plot 'symmetric' or French-style plots for clarity. This means that the figures are not biplots and, while distances between purposes are meaningful, only angles between country points and purposes should be interpreted.10. Number of nodes: Occupy Wall Street, 1702; Indignados, 1498; Aganaktismenoi, 1278.11. See also recent findings from Eurobarometer 2011 regarding Greek citizens' distrust of mainstream media.12. In the visualizations, the size of the actor was determined by calculating in-degree centrality, or the number of incoming links (mentions) by other actors.13. As discussed elsewhere (García-Albacete & Theocharis, Citationin press), despite the difficulties of evaluating whether such a small piece of information implies support of or disagreement with the movement (as reflected by the large percentage of neutral or unclear categories), we interpret the fact that both more clearly positive and negative messages could be identified in the United States as a signal of the higher polarization of the OWS movement compared with Spain or Greece, and show that this interpretation is consistent with pooled findings for the three movements.