Twitter Use in the Occupy Oakland Protests

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

Fairly violent clearouts of the campsite took place across the timeframe of the Occupy Oakland campaign, since October 2011. The local movement has gained a particular reputation within the overall Occupy movement.

Tim and Sky examined the uses of Twitter within the movement, and explored the overlaps between #oo and other hashtags. There are also questions about research ethics here, given the use of Twitter data in arrests and prosecutions. Additionally, Sky also interviewed protesters – and again, there are research ethics concerns which this raises.

What emerges from this are also questions over space and place. Occupy constitutes a space of flows, but there are also clear ties to place (the camps, march routes, etc.); Twitter was used to report on local events and enable participants to circumvent police action, but also for more general information sharing activities which make up for the loss of physical space after campsite clearances, and for linking Oakland message flows to the wider Occupy space on Twitter, and with other protest movements (in Egypt or Athens, for example).

Twitter also served as a debate space, alongside face-to-face discussion, and the pros and cons of this were discussed widely; online participation was seen by some as being of lesser value, while it also enabled others to participate who would not have been able or comfortable to engage face-to-face. At the same time, holding on to a physical space for the movement was seen as a crucial symbol for it.