‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protesters Spread to the Web

Jakarta Globe, Jennifer Preston, October 09, 2011

A demonstrator lies on the ground at an entrance to the National Air
 and Space Museum in Washington after police pepper-sprayed a
 group of protestors trying to get into the museum on Saturday.
(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) 

    

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New York. What began as a small group of protesters expressing their grievances about economic inequities last month from a park in New York City has evolved into an online conversation that is spreading across the country on social media platforms.

Inspired by the populist message of the group known as Occupy Wall Street, more than 200 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have sprung up in dozens of cities during the past week, seeking volunteers for local protests and fostering discussion about the group’s concerns.

Some 900 events have been set up on Meetup.com, and blog posts and photographs from all over the country are popping up on the WeArethe99Percent blog on Tumblr from people who see themselves as victims of not just a sagging economy but also economic injustice.

‘’I don’t want to be rich. I don’t want to live a lavish lifestyle,” a woman wrote on Tumblr, describing herself as a college student worried about the burden of student debt. “I’m worried. I’m scared, thinking about the future shakes me. I hope this works. I really hope this works.”

The online conversation has grown at the same time that street protests took place in several other cities last week, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. The Web site Occupy Together is trying to aggregate the online conversations and the offline activities.

“We are not coordinating anything,” said Justin Wedes, 26, a former high school science teacher from Brooklyn who helps manage one of the movement’s main Twitter accounts, @OccupyWallStNYC. “It is all grassroots. We are just trying to use it to disseminate information, tell stories, ask for donations and to give people a voice.”

To help get the word out about a rally at 3 p.m. on Saturday in Washington Square Park, the group turned to its Facebook and Twitter accounts. “If you are one of the 99 percent, this is your meeting,” the Facebook invitation said. Nearly 700 people replied on Facebook saying that they would be there.

More than 1,000 demonstrators arrived at Washington Square Park for the rally, many of them after marching from the encampment they had established three weeks ago in Zuccotti Park, in Lower Manhattan.

During their march, protesters kept to the sidewalks and out of traffic in a purposeful attempt to prevent arrests. Once there, they held meetings until the early evening, when the crowd dispersed and protesters made their way back to Zuccotti Park, where they were welcomed with loud cheers.

While people in New York are still dominating the conversation on Twitter, an analysis of the micro-blogging site’s data on Friday showed that almost half of the posts were made in other parts of the country, primarily in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, as well as Texas, Florida and Oregon, according Trendrr, a social media analytics firm.

Mark Ghuneim, founder and chief executive officer of Trendrr, said the Twitter conversation was producing an average of 10,000 to 15,000 posts an hour Friday about Occupy Wall Street, with most people sharing links from news sites, Tumblr, YouTube and Trendsmap.

Washington’s National Air and Space Museum was closed after demonstrators tried to enter the building with signs.

“This is more of a growing conversation than something massive as we have seen from hurricanes and with people passing away,” Ghuneim said. “The conversation for this has a strong and steady heartbeat that is spreading. We’re seeing the national dialogue morph into pockets of local and topic-based conversation.”

In Egypt, the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page was started 10 months before the uprising in January to protest police brutality. The page had more than 400,000 members before it was used to help propel protesters into Tahrir Square. Occupy Wall Street’s Facebook page began a few weeks ago and has 138,000 members.

Yet it represents only a sliver of the conversation taking place on Facebook about the group’s anti-corporate message. Unlike in Egypt, where people found one another on one Facebook page, geographically based Occupy Facebook pages have cropped up, reflecting the loosely organized approach of the group. These Occupy pages are being used not only to echo the issues being discussed in New York about jobs, corporate greed and budget cuts, but also to talk about other problems closer to home.

In Tennessee, for example, there is an Occupy Tennessee Facebook page, as well as pages for Occupy Memphis, Occupy Knoxville, Occupy Clarksville, Occupy Chattanooga, Occupy Murfreesboro and Occupy Nashville, which helped get out the word about a lunchtime protest in Nashville’s Legislative Plaza on Friday that drew several hundred protesters with some bearing signs with the movement’s motto: “We are the 99 percent.”

The center of the movement’s media operation is in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, where several hundred people have been camping since Sept. 17.

The New York Times

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