Open/Networked Movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party
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Transcript of Open/Networked Movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party
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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
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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?
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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
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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??
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Tea Party in the news
• Fox News anticipates the news, helping build support for the first April 15, 2009 rallies (Source: Skocpol and Williamson)
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Tea Party in the news (cont.)
• The same was true for July 4 and August recess Tea Party events (Source: Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin)
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Occupy in the news
• Early coverage was self-generated
• Police clashes were central
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OWS: Twitter vs newspapers
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Occupy vs Tea Party (news)
• Tea Party boosted by early coverage from Fox News
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Occupy growth on Facebook
• Local Occupies rapidly multiply via Facebook
• Initial burst of affiliation levels off
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Viral saturation
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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
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#tcot
• As of July 2009, Top Conservatives on Twitter were a vibrant interconnected community
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Occupy Livestreams
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TPP on Ning
• 92,000 active members
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TPP on Facebook
• 855,000 likes, but not that many people “talking about” TPP as of now.
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Freedom Connector
• 171,000 active participants; still growing.
• More varied base, includes evangelicals, not just TP
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The role of e-groups
• FreedomWorks email list goes out to more than 1 million members
• Relationship between Occupy and MoveOn not as close
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NYCGA Structure
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NYCGA Working groups
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OWS on Facebook
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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
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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
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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