Structural Patterns of the Occupy Movement on Facebook

Abstract

The Occupy movement protests against social and economic inequality around the world. It emerged in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 and is organized at a city level. In this paper we study its social organization on Facebook, by means of a thorough quantitative analysis on users’ content consumption. In particular, we focus on structural patterns of users interaction with the movement pages and on the role of local affiliations on the consumption patterns. First, we characterize users’ activity finding that passive endorsement (liking) is more dominant than active participation to the debate (commenting). Then, we label users according to their mobility patterns across pages of the various local communities, finding that online activities are not locally coordinated by geographically close pages. Indeed, pages linked to major US cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, drive the diffusion of contents online and serve as coordination points for all other pages.