“From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world,” reported Ben Berkowitz on Reuters, who in his article traced the life of the famous #OccupyWallStreet hashtag. The movement originally stemmed from a blog post by activist group Adbusters on July 13, 2011, calling for protesters to “Occupy Wall Street” on Sept. 17 in lower Manhattan. Berkowitz says “…Credit goes to the Twitter account of Newyorkist, whose more than 11,000 tweets chronicle the city in block-by-block detail. His was one of the first well-followed accounts to mention the protests in mid-September, which sparked the first wave of attention for the movement on social channels.”
The OWS movement truly began to “Occupy Social Media” around September 17. To take a deep look at this, we plugged the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag into our social media monitoring tool Meltwater Buzz to see how much traction the movement received on Twitter prior to day 1 of the protests compared to afterwards, and tweets increased approximately 850 percent in just 24 hours (see second graph below). As the days went on, protesters flooded social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube to share photos, video and overall, express their thoughts. But even all that social activity didn’t spill over right away into the mainstream media.
To juxtapose the news media coverage of OWS with the social conversation, we used our news monitoring tool, Meltwater News to study coverage in the early days of the September gatherings. The first reports from mainstream media were actually about the lack of coverage, as many including Eric Randall of The Atlantic reported on Sept. 28, 2011. Journalists noted that the build-up of coverage was, in part, a reflection of a major shortcoming of the campaign, including a “lack of a clear goal.” Kat Stoeffel of the New York Observer expressed this in her Sept. 26 article, where she said that she struggled to find a media narrative out of her visit to Liberty Plaza in New York. However, after witnessing police brutality and the OWS’s video documentation of the events, she wrote, “The video won’t bring regulatory reform to financial services, reinstate capital gains tax, or repeal Citizens United, but it is one way to end a media blackout, or bounce back from a bad review.” That’s precisely what Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics.com said in an article a few weeks back: “…cable news and traditional journalists largely ignored the protests until something violent happened and quickly lost interest thereafter.” Like Delany, we also noticed an uptick in news coverage around violent events (see graph below). Delany includes a similar image in his post here, but given the recent developments with #OccupyOakland, we had to see if the trend in media coverage was continuing.
Mainstream media also started paying attention when OWS sparked reactions from high-profile individuals, including 2012 U.S. presidential candidates. Here are just a few:
- During an October 6 news conference, President Obama said “I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country … and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place.”
- Herman Cain accused the movement of being “anti-capitalist” and argued “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”
- Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying at the 2012 Bloomberg Washington Post Debate, “Let me draw a distinction. Virtually every American has a reason to be angry. I think virtually every American has a reason to be worried. I think the people who are protesting in Wall Street break into two groups: one is left-wing agitators who would be happy to show up next week on any other topic, and the other is sincere middle-class people who frankly are very close to the Tea Party people who care. And actually…you can tell which are which. The people who are decent, responsible citizens pick up after themselves. The people who are just out there as activists trash the place and walk off and are proud of having trashed it, so let’s draw that distinction.”
- Ron Paul stated, “If they were demonstrating peacefully, and making a point, and arguing our case, and drawing attention to the Fed – I would say, ‘good!’”
- Mitt Romney did admit that there were ‘bad actors,’ and the need for them to be ‘found and plucked out.’ He later expressed sympathy for the movement, saying, “I look at what’s happening on Wall Street and my view is, boy, I understand how those people feel.”
While mainstream media coverage dropped in and out, social media channels remained consistent with a steady stream of updates, particularly on Twitter. The graph below, pulled from Meltwater Buzz, shows the pattern of Twitter conversations since the first protests on September 17. The highest amount of hits – nearly 8 million – occurred between Oct. 9 and Oct. 15 when tens of thousands of demonstrators were called to rally around the world.
The evolution from a blog with a Twitter hashtag to in-person events all over the globe with mainstream media coverage in fewer than four months exemplifies the power of social media. OWS might be the perfect example of how social media can start a revolution… and we intend to monitor it and its effects on policy leading up to the 2012 election. Visit us right back here for more on the Meltwater Election Buzz category on the official Meltwater Blog.
