The Anatomy of the Occupy Wall Street Movement on Twitter

from technologyreview

A study of the social network behind the Occupy movement shows that the most vocal participants were highly connected before the protests began but have now largely lost interest, say social network researchers

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011 as a grass roots protest against the inequality, greed and corruption associated with the financial sector of the economy. The movement adopted the slogan: ”We are the 99%” which refers to the distribution of wealth in the US between the richest 1 per cent and the rest.

What was extraordinary about this movement was the speed with which it spread, passing rapidly between communities via social media and Twitter in particular.

So an interesting question is how this movement became so big, so quickly and what has happened since to the most active participants.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Michael Conover and buddies at Indiana University in Bloomington. These guys have studied the flow of information across Twitter related to the Occupy Wall Street movement before and after the protests began. They’ve also looked at the individuals involved and how their Twitter activity has changed over this time period.

Their astonishing conclusion is that despite its fiery birth, the Occupy Wall Street movement has become a damp squib and that the key people behind it have lost interest.

Conover and co began by studying the tweets associated with Occupy-related hashtags over a 15-month period starting three months before the protests began. That gave them a corpus of information consisting of more than .8 million tweets from almost half a million separate accounts.

They then studied a randomly chosen set of 25,000 of these users to see how their behaviour, and the network of links between them, changed throughout this time.

The results make for interesting reading. It turns out that the most vocal participants appeared to be highly connected before the movement began. They also shared a common interest in domestic politics.

But while this group became highly vocal during the movement’s peak, their engagement has dropped significantly. As Conover and co put it: “These same users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the movement’s birth, appear to have lost interest in Occupy-related communication.”

In other words, the Occupy Walls Street movement appears to have faded away.

A significant problem is how to interpret this result. On the one hand, it would be easy to conclude that the movement has largely failed with most activists returning to life as it was before.

But Conover and co are careful to sidestep this conclusion. “An argument can be made that the movement played a role in increasing the prominence of social and economic inequality in the public discourse,” they say.

In any case, it’s unreasonably to expect that the group could have maintained the level of activity that it reached at the peak.

What it does show is how powerful the collective voice can become when it triggers the interest of a subset of users who are already connected. That’s a lesson that other activists and those they target should readily embrace.

However, Conover and co are critical of the way the movement has died away. In particular, they point to a re-occupation movement which began in May 2012 but after which engagement levels on Twitter returned to close to their previous levels within a week or so.

“It is doubtless that supporters may have hoped for a more sustained discourse than is evident from the near-complete abandonment of these once high-profile communication channels,” they conclude.

That seems harsh given that the goal of the movement was not to change the behaviour of the protesters but to change the behaviour of those in position to tackle the inequalities that triggered the movement, such as those in the financial sector and the politicians and regulators who govern them.

So an interesting follow up would be to use the same powerful microscope of social behaviour to identify this group, to study their behaviour and to see whether it has changed in a way that correlates to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A difficult challenge but surely one worth pursuing. In the meantime, the Occupy Wall Street movement may just be sleeping.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1306.5474 : The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street.

A study of the social network behind the Occupy movement shows that the most vocal participants were highly connected before the protests began but have now largely lost interest, say social network researchers

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011 as a grass roots protest against the inequality, greed and corruption associated with the financial sector of the economy. The movement adopted the slogan: ”We are the 99%” which refers to the distribution of wealth in the US between the richest 1 per cent and the rest.

What was extraordinary about this movement was the speed with which it spread, passing rapidly between communities via social media and Twitter in particular.

So an interesting question is how this movement became so big, so quickly and what has happened since to the most active participants.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Michael Conover and buddies at Indiana University in Bloomington. These guys have studied the flow of information across Twitter related to the Occupy Wall Street movement before and after the protests began. They’ve also looked at the individuals involved and how their Twitter activity has changed over this time period.

Their astonishing conclusion is that despite its fiery birth, the Occupy Wall Street movement has become a damp squib and that the key people behind it have lost interest.

Conover and co began by studying the tweets associated with Occupy-related hashtags over a 15-month period starting three months before the protests began. That gave them a corpus of information consisting of more than .8 million tweets from almost half a million separate accounts.

They then studied a randomly chosen set of 25,000 of these users to see how their behaviour, and the network of links between them, changed throughout this time.

The results make for interesting reading. It turns out that the most vocal participants appeared to be highly connected before the movement began. They also shared a common interest in domestic politics.

But while this group became highly vocal during the movement’s peak, their engagement has dropped significantly. As Conover and co put it: “These same users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the movement’s birth, appear to have lost interest in Occupy-related communication.”

In other words, the Occupy Walls Street movement appears to have faded away.

A significant problem is how to interpret this result. On the one hand, it would be easy to conclude that the movement has largely failed with most activists returning to life as it was before.

But Conover and co are careful to sidestep this conclusion. “An argument can be made that the movement played a role in increasing the prominence of social and economic inequality in the public discourse,” they say.

In any case, it’s unreasonably to expect that the group could have maintained the level of activity that it reached at the peak.

What it does show is how powerful the collective voice can become when it triggers the interest of a subset of users who are already connected. That’s a lesson that other activists and those they target should readily embrace.

However, Conover and co are critical of the way the movement has died away. In particular, they point to a re-occupation movement which began in May 2012 but after which engagement levels on Twitter returned to close to their previous levels within a week or so.

“It is doubtless that supporters may have hoped for a more sustained discourse than is evident from the near-complete abandonment of these once high-profile communication channels,” they conclude.

That seems harsh given that the goal of the movement was not to change the behaviour of the protesters but to change the behaviour of those in position to tackle the inequalities that triggered the movement, such as those in the financial sector and the politicians and regulators who govern them.

So an interesting follow up would be to use the same powerful microscope of social behaviour to identify this group, to study their behaviour and to see whether it has changed in a way that correlates to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A difficult challenge but surely one worth pursuing. In the meantime, the Occupy Wall Street movement may just be sleeping.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1306.5474 : The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street.

Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, Brazil unrest and Hillary Clinton's big choice

from thehill.com

By Brent Budowsky - 06/21/13 12:53 PM ET

In my last column I suggested that Hillary Clinton's big decision is not whether she runs for president, but what kind of president she would be if she does run and win.

Now a new poll shows Clinton would still clobber Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) in a Florida match-up. So much for the collapsed and discredited campaign of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to smear Clinton.

If this were the NBA finals, the score would be Clinton 120, Issa 40. Republican commentators are reduced to (falsely) suggesting Democrats are in trouble if Clinton does not run. Republican commentary careens from fantasy-like discussion of Sarah Palin — the part-term former governor of Alaska, which reads like 14 year old boys trying to date the prom queen — to equally fantasy-like discussion of Rubio that describes him as the GOP "savior."

Rubio is a serious man, which is why he is under attack from the are right, and he deserves better than comparison with any savior. 

Meanwhile, the show of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in the midst is halfway through its 15 minutes of fame, while House Republicans, not satisfied with trying to alienate Hispanics for a generation, now insult America's farmers with their latest comic opera failure on the floor of the House.

Democrats should not rejoice. President Obama appears adrift, a president without a purpose or a passion, who gave a speech in Berlin that was attended by virtually nobody except invited guests and included nothing worthy of the occasion.

There is something powerful and profound happening in America and around the world. There are commonalities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, and between those demonstrating in Brazil and those still pursuing the Arab Spring. They are the commonalities of opposition to insider elites and insider establishments of all kinds, in all places. 

As I noted in my column, the 10 percent favorable ratings for Congress should be humiliating to all who serve in Congress, but the poll showed almost equally humiliating public disapproval for big banks, big labor, newspapers and television news, among others.

There is a giant populist wave that continues to gather, and a battle of ideas between those who take the Tea Party line and those who take the Occupy Wall Street line. And between those who embody principled conservatism and those who embody principled progressivism. Neither kamikaze fantasy players on the retrograde right or robotic defenders of all things Obama are answering the call of the people. 

If Hillary Clinton steps into this breach, the great political realignment will arrive in 2016. 

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/307057-tea-party-occupy-wall-street-arab-spring-brazil-unrest-and-hillary-clintons-big-choice#ixzz2XAjBGRYA 
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

Of banksters and debtors' prison

from aljazzeera

American students carry the economic consequences of an inequality based system while banksters take advantage. Last Modified: 01 Feb 2013 08:48

A system that benefit education loans lenders pretends to equalise access to education causing a huge student debt that most people cannot afford to pay back [Reuters]

Last week, American public television's Frontline aired its new documentary, The Untouchables, which revisits the question of why the Department of Justice failed to indict a single senior Wall Street executive responsible for engineering the mortgage securitisation industry that was "rotten to the core", and at the heart of the 2008 financial meltdown from which ninety percent of Americans have yet to recover. In the film, reporter Martin Smith presses Lanny Breuer, the head of the criminal division within the Department of Justice, on why he did not pursue criminal charges of the senior officials in Wall Street, in spite of ample evidence of fraud that the episode's researchers - along with other journalists,documentarians and lawyers - had been able to find with just a bit of digging. Breuer responded: "I am personally offended by much of what I've seen. I think there was a level of greed, a level of excessive risk taking, that I find abominable and I find very upsetting. But that is not what creates a criminal case. What makes a criminal case is that I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of a crime." Breuer insists that he was unable to prove criminal intent and thus could not bring a criminal trial against the banksters. Unfair differences Given that what occurred in Wall Street's executive board rooms may well be the crime of our time with scores of victims who are unlikely to recover, Breuer's excessive caution and lawyerly reluctance to take a case he might have lost, appears deeply negligent rather than judicious. "The Government Accountability Office conducted a study that found that less than one percent of all student debtors had applied for bankruptcy" Compare the generous slack cut to the senior executives of Wall Street who -by accounts from whistleblowers, former employees, and even FBI investigators - committed acts of fraud, to how our present law treats current and future student debtors - that is, as presumed criminals. Student debt, unlike every other kind of debt, cannot bedischarged (except in the case of the nebulously defined and rarely granted, "undue hardship"). It began to acquire this exceptional status in 1976, when legislators invoked the false threat of student debt cheaters, then hyping up the need to create protections against them. At the time of the debate, Democratic House Representative James O'Hara insisted that to remove the possibility of bankruptcy from student debtors, Congress would not only be treating them in a different manner than all other consumer debtors, but would be treating them as criminals: "No other legitimately contracted consumer loan, applied to a legitimate undertaken [sic], is subjected to the assumption of criminality which this provision applies to every educational loan." Indeed, in law professor John AE Pottow's "The Search for a Theory" for why the US was persuaded to make student loans immune from bankruptcy, he lays out six possible theories as to why the US came to treat student debt "extraordinarily". In reviewing court decisions and politicians' rhetoric, he concludes that students were persuasively cast as "opportunistic debtors" who would "softy defraud the system" if given the chance. In fact, this presumption of criminal intent in those who seek out student loans was entirely unfounded. In 1977, the Government Accountability Office conducted a study that found that less than one percent of all student debtors had applied for bankruptcy; the average annual income of those who did file for bankruptcywas $6,378; the most common job of those seeking relief through bankruptcy was that of teacher.  Is the US student debt bubble about to burst? Today, approximately 37 million Americans hold an average of $24,301 in student debt for a combined total of one trillion dollars. Of those, an average of 13.4 percent have defaulted within the first three years of payments, a record high that surely reflects the miserable economic reality that most Americans face. Last week, a handful of senators co-sponsored theFairness for Struggling Students Act of 2013, a reincarnation of legislation that Senator Dick Durbin introduced last year that would allow private (not federal) student loans to be discharged, in an attempt to roll back the exceptionalism student loans have acquired over the last forty years. While the bill is a welcome gesture, it does not go nearly far enough to alleviate the untenable debt burden held by hundreds of thousands of people. The proposal A more robust proposal to reform student law appeared in the pages of the Harvard Law Review at the end of 2012, one that adequately and comprehensively addresses the crisis of student debt that plagues both freshly minted graduates as well as those who have been attempting to pay down loans for over a quarter of a century. The proposal recommends restoring dischargeability to all student debt - including federal loans that represent 85 percent of student debt - and applying this retroactively so that those suffering under the burden of untenable loans right now will have a chance of relief. Perhaps the article's most profound recommendation is that federal student lending programmes adopt some form of risk-rating which, in short, would make their loans more difficult to obtain and thus curb the spiraling cost of education which is, in part, enabled by indiscriminate lending practices. In other words, the article advocates that student lenders stop talking out of two sides of their mouths: pretending to provide a social service by equalising access to education while racking up profits in a system rigged to their advantage. "...children born into low-income households are more likely to remain in low-income households than prior to 1980, forcing even the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to conclude that we are indeed a 'comparatively immobile society'." This inconsistency is succinctly captured in the House Report to the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, written as Congress debated the law that would dramatically change the treatment of student debt: "It is inappropriate to view the programme as social legislation when granting the loans, but strictly as business when attempting to collect. Such inconsistency does not square with general bankruptcy policy." Of course it only makes sense that hapless, hopeful, or misledyoung people who took out loans for education should be like every other debtor: permitted to have crushing burdens discharged so they may live lives not defined by squalor, anxiety or the inability to fully participate in society - or even just buy stuff. But it must also be remembered that the underlying ideology of student lending perpetuates the myth that education can serve as a great social and economic equaliser. In the landscape of stark and rising economic inequality that our rapacious and unhinged capitalist economy has created - where most jobs being created earn less than $14 an hour  - access to higher education ismeaningless for all but a few. Over the past twenty years, the rise in student debt has paralleled the widening gap in wealth. The US is now one of the most unequal societies among the OECD countries. New data compiled and recently published by the Economic Policy Institute has found that the top one percent of Americans have seen an 8.2 percent increase in their earnings from 2009 to 2011, while the wages of the bottom 90 percent have continued their sharp decline. In fact, study after study find that children born into low-income households are more likely to remain in low-income households than prior to 1980, forcing even the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to conclude that we are indeed a "comparatively immobile society". Hammered: final nail in coffin of the myth of the American Dream. As the one percenters rebound with gusto, thousands less fortunate continue to languish in the debtors' prison created by student loans and their usurious terms of repayment. Banksters have never paid for duping the world; students have never stopped paying for being duped. Charlotte Silver is a journalist based in San Francisco and the West Bank. She is a graduate of Stanford University.  Follow her on Twitter: @CharEsilver The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy

‘District 9′ Director Neill Blomkamp Ascends to ‘Elysium’

from wsj

• Article
• Comments (3)

SPEAKEASY HOME PAGE »

• smaller
• Larger

• facebook
• twitter
• google plus
• linked in

• Email
• Print

By Barbara Chai

Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

‘Elysium’ writer-director Neill Blomkamp.

In 2009, writer-director Neill Blomkamp stormed the Hollywood scene with “District 9,” his alien thriller set in South Africa that took viewers and critics by surprise.

Until then, Blomkamp had only made short films, including a series set in the “Halo” universe which caught the attention of Peter Jackson and led to a planned “Halo” feature. That film fell through, but Jackson ended up producing a feature about extraterrestrial activity in Johannesburg based on another of Blomkamp’s shorts.

That film, “District 9,” co-written with Terri Tatchell, cost $34 million to make and melded computer graphics with Blomkamp’s cinema verité style. It earned $216 million world-wide and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Since then, Blomkamp, 33, has attracted a strong following of fans who eagerly awaithis new sci-fi film, “Elysium,” which will be released Aug. 9 by Sony 6758.TO +1.40%TriStar Pictures and Media Rights Capital.

“Elysium” is set in the year 2154 and is about a world divided by wealth – the majority of inhabitants suffer on a decrepit Earth, while the privileged few ascend to Elysium, an orbiting space station where there’s no such thing as war, poverty or sickness.

The director talked with the Journal about the making of “Elysium,” why he chose to incorporate themes such as class and immigration, and his filmmaking career. Below is the first of three parts.

“District 9″ took Hollywood by surprise and now you have a legion of fans eager for your next film. Did you feel any pressure while making “Elysium” to have it live up to the first success?

The concept of even having fans is still kind of weird to me. I really just feel like a filmmaker that is only just finding my foot in and is beginning to participate in Hollywood and making films. So the idea of any kind of fandom or people that are waiting for something that I may release is very distant in my mind. It almost doesn’t even factor in. So I didn’t really feel any pressure in regards to pleasing people that liked “District 9″ and will they or will they not like “Elysium”? My mind just doesn’t really work that way, currently. It became more about, does “Elysium” live or die by its own merits? Am I making a film that, if I was an audience member sitting down in a theater seat, would be a film that I would want to see? I mean, for me, the answer is yes, absolutely. That’s how I went about making it.

Kimberley French

Matt Damon in ‘Elysium,’ written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.

What is it like to go from a $34 million budget for “District 9” to a $115 million budget for “Elysium”?

Weirdly, it actually didn’t feel that different for me. The process felt incredibly similar. You can make films in Hollywood where they have like a $200 million budget and everything is cushioned like crazy. You have this 20% buffer in every department and it feels like you’re just burning money and everybody’s very relaxed and you kind of take your time and just work slowly on things. Or there’s the approach like “Elysium” which is, even though it cost $100 million, it should look like a $200 million film. It should be punching significantly above its weight. The same way “District 9″ looked more than it cost $30 million. They both operate by the same principle. When you’re doing that, there’s no comfort in having $100 million. The budget feels as tight and it feels as stringent as “District 9″ did. The crew feels like they’re maxed out, everybody’s pushing as hard as they can. So, to me it felt exactly the same as “District 9.” It just felt three times bigger. But the cool thing is, when you’re doing it that way, it leads to some interesting films that I think don’t happen if you have all of the comfort and luxury in the world.

Did you feel pressure on the business side of things?

The only pressure I felt, which is totally separate from fans or living up to “District 9,” is I feel a financial obligation of the film, having to live up to and make its money back. I want to make a film that is commercially successful because that means that the larger cinema-going audience around the world like the movie, which is my goal. That’s my job, to make films that people respond to. If financially it does well, I get to make more films, and if it doesn’t do well financially, it starts to become more difficult for me to get other films made. So, that pressure of just the size of the film does occasionally enter your mind. But that’s the only pressure I felt. There’s no artistic pressure.

“Elysium” has well-known actors Jodie Foster and Matt Damon, whereas on “District 9” you worked with a largely unknown cast. Was there a noticeable difference?

I expected it to be very different, and it actually wasn’t. It was more pleasurable and easier than I was expecting, and than “District 9.” Because they’re so experienced and they’re so talented and know what you’re looking for that it makes the process very easy. I kept saying that my job was being made easier. If anything, it actually alleviates pressure.

Do you ever envision making a film that’s not sci-fi?

Yeah, totally. But what I do not envision is ever making a film that doesn’t have any kind of fantasy element to it. I’m just not interested in straight-ahead drama, or a straight-ahead action film. The only genre of movie that I could see making that doesn’t have anything magical or otherworldly about it would be a war film. I’m very interested in history and a war film could be something that would lure me in. But other than that, if there aren’t other worlds to go to, or other weird things to experience, I’m just not really interested in making it. Sci-fi is just one of many places. You could have fantasy. You could go forwards or backwards in time. I’m really interested in different forms of horror. But it has to have that element. To me, that’s what cinema is. Cinema isn’t a bunch of people talking at a dinner party — I’m just not interested in that.

Check back in for Parts 2 and 3 of the interview with “Elysium” writer-director Neill Blomkamp. Follow @barbarachai

THE CANTORS OCCUPY WALL STREET

from powerlineblog.com

In a recent post about the prospects of passing amnesty legislation in the House, I referred to the Majority Leader as Eric “Wall Street” Cantor. Some readers probably wondered where I was coming from.

This article in Politico may help explain. Politico reports that Diana Cantor, the wife of the Majority Leader, has joined the board of Revlon, the cosmetic giant.

You may recall Revlon’s role in the Monica Lewinsky matter. After the end of Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan, Clinton’s fixer, helped arrange for Lewinsky to interview with Revlon. When Lewinsky told Jordan that the interview hadn’t gone well, he called Revlon’s CEO, Ronald Perelman. The company then offered Lewinsky a job. Clinton thanked Jordan for making this happen.

Perelman is still in charge of Revlon and he also still runs the holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes, that owns a large chunk of the Revlon. According to Politico, Perelman is now aclose friend of Eric Cantor and his wife. He dines with them in New York, and the majority leader reportedly has slept in Perelman’s home.

Perelman is a major donor to Cantor’s political campaigns – he has donated $47,300 to Cantor’s various political committees. Employees of MacAndrews & Forbes have also made significant donations to Cantor.

According to Politico, Diana Cantor sits on the boards of three other major corporations: Universal Corporation, a tobacco company; Media General, which formerly owned newspapers including the Richmond Times-Dispatch; and Domino’s Pizza. She recently left the board of The Edelman Financial Group.

I have nothing against Ms. Cantor sitting on corporate boards. And Eric Cantor is, of course, free to pick both his friends and his financial backers.

But conservatives can’t realistically expect Eric Cantor to buck the interests of big business, including its interest in seeing amnesty legislation passed as part of a deal in which business — big and small — gets what it wants on the immigration front.

Recommend this Power Line article to your Facebook friends.