#oo activism:
uses of Twitter within
the Occupy Oakland movement
Dr. Sky Croeser
Curtin University
skycroeser.net // @scroeser
Dr. Tim Highfield
Curtin University and
Queensland University of Technology
timhighfield.net // @timhighfield

Introduction
How do new media matter?
Occupy Oakland background
Methodology
#oo and Occupy Oakland: overlapping spaces

The important questions ... are precisely
how new media matter; how particular new
media tools affect emerging forms, patterns,
and structures of organization; and how
virtual and physical forms of protest and
communication are mutually constitutive.
- Juris, J. S. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere

Occupy Oakland
2009/2010: protests around the shooting of Oscar Grant on the BART system.
October 10, 2011: First Occupy site at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza.
October 15: around 2,500 people march in support of OO.
October 18: additional camp at Snow Park.
October 25: Police raids on camps.
October 27: Plaza temporarily retaken.
October 28: Solidarity march for Tahrir Square.
November 2: General Strike.
November 10: Kayode Ola Foster fatally shot near the Plaza (unrelated to
OO).
December 12: Port shutdown.

Cartoons by Susie
Cagle, Occupy
Oakland's
embedded reporter.

Methodology: Quantitative
Snapshots of Twitter activity around the #oo
hashtag captured using:
NodeXL – capture most recent tweets
Archivist – live archival of tweets
Data collected at intervals between 29 January
and 6 March 2012; intention of project not to
provide a comprehensive, continuous analysis of
all #oo activity, but to identify different uses of
Twitter over time within the movement
Here focus on 10-13 February 2012

Methodology: Quantitative
Data processed using Gawk scripts for large
Twitter datasets (Bruns & Burgess, 2011)
Extract salient details from tweets:
Hashtags
URLs
@mentions/retweets
Map Twitter user networks through #oo tweets
using Gephi and NodeXL

#oo – 10-13 Feb
Large group of users,
densely interconnected
– but does not
demonstrate variations
around different
themes/hashtags –
whether
users/connections are
repeated or unique to
particular debates
9360 tweets
2432 nodes
5807 edges
Degree range 3+
741 nodes, 3817 edges

#oo + #ftp – 10-13 Feb
#ftp – march occurring
during this period
against police actions.
Users central to overall
#oo network also
prominent here,
accounts covering
march live in tweets or
livestreaming footage.
1659 tweets
453 nodes
1166 edges

#oo + #ows – 10-13 Feb
Users including Occupy
Wall Street as well as
Oakland in tweets form
a much less dense
network – clustering
around different Occupy
accounts (e.g. Occupy
Oregon, Chicago,
Portland).
810 tweets
260 nodes
419 edges

Twitter ethics
Publicly accessible tweets, but sensitive
subject?
I have been arrested three times for nothing.
For nothing. For exercising my rights as a
free citizen in this society. ... I’m not a
criminal ... it was only when I started
Occupying that I started getting arrested –
[interview 1]

Methodology: Qualitative
Participant observation: meetings, actions,
and in the everyday space of #oo.
Thirteen semi-structured interviews ranging
from 14 to 45 minutes in length.
Material from blog posts and other public
spaces in which activists reflected on their
experiences and politics.

Limits
• Project limited by a suspicion not only of
surveillance (including of police informants and
provocateurs) but also of academics.
• Demonstrates concerns within the movement not
only about security risks, but also about the
movement being coopted, and about how the
movement is portrayed to outsiders.

space // place
"The burden of my argument here is not that
place is not concrete, grounded, real, but
rather that space - global space - is so too."
Doreen Massey, Geographies of Responsibility,
p. 7

Functions of Twitter use
Tactical function through covering Occupy
Oakland live on Twitter
• Livestreaming marches, tweeting police action
• Providing a record of police brutality, sharing details of
individual officers harming protesters
• Sharing information for other protesters – avoiding kettling,
arrests
• Requests for support, including bringing water, equipment
to specific locations
• Sharing legal information

Broader solidarity work
(primarily within Occupy)
• Calls for financial aid
• Jail support for Occupiers
• Creation and maintenance of links with other Occupy sites
in the U.S. (and overseas)
• Hashtags for different Occupy movements used
alongside #oo in gathered tweets – make messages
visible to a wider group of Twitter users by including
multiple hashtags in comments
• Gathered data includes tweets not specifically about
Occupy Oakland, but which link to this movement by
including #oo as one of several Occupy hashtags –
and tweets about Occupy Oakland which also make
use of hashtags such as #ows, #opdx, #osf

#oo and Occupy elsewhere
Most frequently used hashtags in #oo tweets
Oakland other Occupy 10-13 Feb 2012
OO 9246 occupysf 392
OWS 4563 OLA 380
osf 2085 occupychi 378
FTP 1670 anonymous 349
occupy 1362 Syria 295
occupyoakland 1345 J28 294
opdx 777 solidarity 260
occupyla 640 OPD 250
greece 513 occupyCAL 235
OCAM 426 occupydc 232

“Egypt and Oakland are like one fist”

“We say like Egypt and Oakland are like one fist
because people come from Egypt and they say
what I see here is what I saw in Egypt, you
guys don’t have it as bad as us but that doesn’t
mean you are not going to.” [interview 2]
“if you want to overthrow capitalism and create a
new future for humanity there are very few
islands of strength like right now you can go to
Cairo, come to Oakland” [interview 1]
“we talked about Egypt and how Cairo and the
march of Tahrir Square and I think Twitter has
had a huge influence on that there is definitely,
I don’t know you would see so much
international connection without Twitter”
[interview 3]

Engagement with
international movements
• Links with international movements one of the few times
when use of Twitter not positioned as problematic.
• Interviews noted the link with Egypt as important for
Occupy Oakland participants.
• Links with Greece increasingly widespread during first
months of 2012.
• This is not one-way solidarity; links received too from other
international sites, further connecting international activists.
• Within tweets, this demonstrates a shift from #oo being
specific to Oakland, to the hashtag coinciding with Oakland.
• This function of Twitter is perhaps the clearest example of
its use as a Castells-like space of flows and borderlessness.

Twitter as a space for debate
“I went back and forth on the GA and the forums. When
it turned for me, and I think for a lot of people is when
it stared getting into the conversation about violence
versus non-violence. Which just is this giant pain in
the ass for Oakland. I just personally think that it is a
useless debate...people are just going to do what they
want to do and everyone should back the fuck off and
accept that people are gonna do what they want to
do. ... it was stupid, just stupid, and it took so much
time and energy it was really frustrating. ... and yeah,
then the GA voted down the idea of having a
progressive stack which I really liked.” [interview 3]
“This was the Achilles' heel, if there was one, for the
Occupy movement in North America” [interview 1]

Twitter as a space for debate
• Twitter overcomes the shortcomings of the General
Assembly (GA) model
• Seen as taking too long, repeatedly rehashing debates,
passing repeated resolutions which achieved very little.
• However, Twitter is also seen as particularly prone to
conflict (through the 140 character limit and non-F2F
contact)
• Twitter denigated as not seen as “authentic” – armchair
activists.
• Arguments about legitimate participants in the debate;
place is an important factor in the construction of
difference.
• Repeated calls for people to talk F2F rather than on Twitter,
demonstrate their commitment to physical presence

Airing grievances/trolling
• While the physical place of Occupy Oakland is seen as
more authentic, it is also a space in which some people
cannot participate.
• Lack of anonymity, exposure to potential physical
threats.
• Some participants (ex-participants, critics) then use Twitter
so that they can engage in criticism.
• Social media then transcend the limitations of the physical
place.
• Sense of physical insecurity, opportunity to be
anonymous.
• Twitter is not entirely unfettered, though; users actively
trolling the #oo hashtag and individuals.

Twitter is most important as a way to
“holding space...” hold the space of Occupy Oakland
when the police shut down the
physical presence.
“You can wake up people as much
as you want but you have to give
them a place to go to. So I think it is
important that we always have a
presence, so when someone is
brave enough to step forwards
someone else is there to say I’m
here you can come talk to me and
come see what is going on.”
[interview 2]

Conclusion
Twitter use at Occupy Oakland is shaped by the
particularities of the movement, particularly the
area's radical history and the intense police
repression which activists face.
Activists move between the place of Occupy
Oakland and the space of #oo, making use of
the affordances of each where possible,
constrained in each case.