From support to opposition: evaluating Occupy Wall Street’s competing narratives on Twitter

Almost five years after its peak, the legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) still very much remains part of the cultural fabric, collective self-perception, and formation of contemporary social movements. The name of the movement itself has entered academic and non-academic discourses to describe social movements that occupy both physical and digital spaces. At the same time, Twitter has become the point of reference in discussions regarding the limitations of social media in accommodating democratic debates and in extension, evoking real social change. Indeed easily accessible, Twitter has encouraged social media infused protests and connected hundreds of OWS’ supporters who shared thousands of tweets per day; but tο what degree has Twitter conveyed the opposing-to-OWS voices too? And how similar, or how different, were the OWS narratives structured by the opponents and the supporters of the movement? In this paper, I focus on the stories these two contesting parts tell on Twitter during the forty days prior to the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti park, on the 15th of November 2011. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the tweets tweeted during this 40-day period, under the #OWS hashtag, allows us to examine the stories told by OWS supporters and OWS opponents, and unpack a number of narratives related to the character of the movement, its organisation practices, as well as narratives of online/Twitter and on-the-ground violence. The aim here is not to offer a holistic analysis of OWS but to examine the patterns in which stories told on Twitter can bestow this digital medium democratic attributes. As it will be discussed, the opposing and the supportive narratives fluctuated throughout October and mid-November, and were contingent to a number of variables including: the stage of the movement, the strength of the Twitter-support OWS got, the vigour of its opposition on Twitter, the specificity of violent or offensive events, and the composed image of the movement by the mainstream media. This number of variables interacted and thereby convoluted the magnitude of stories discussing OWS on Twitter while at the same time revealed the benefits and limitations of using social media during major protest events. The narratives structuring OWS were manifold and polyphonic, and the impact of Twitter’s instantaneity and ephemerality constructed a polymorphic story for the movement. Yet, even the existence of diverse settings and users, and amongst so many voices, there was a meaningful degree to which information and people on Twitter converged around complementary and competing narratives, one in which allows us to track a significant representation of both supportive and opposing voices to the movement.