Infighting and backbiting that has crippled the movement plays out on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Updated with comment from Justine Tunneyposted on
This Twitter handle is now back under the management of its founder:@JustineTunney. Let's start a revolution.
Updated 3:47 p.m., Feb. 8
Occupy Wall Street is dead — but its Twitter account is alive, and it’s become a fascinating hotbed of infighting between rival factions of the group that once slept out in New York’s Zuccotti Park.
Activist Justine Tunney, a Google engineer, has wrested control of the main@OccupyWallSt Twitter account away from other activists and is taking shots at important figures from the movement, including academic David Graeber, considered by some to be the intellectual father of Occupy. Though Tunney founded the account in 2011, other activists once had access to it. The big question: Who founded Occupy?
“I was the founding organizer of this movement,” Tunney tweeted from @OccupyWallSt on Thursday. “But prejudiced people have always tried to deny me a voice in this movement.”
Tunney noticed that Google names organizer Justin Wedes as the founder of Occupy, and asked followers to put a stop to it:
If you Google search "who founded occupy" it incorrectly says@JustinWedes. Please click report and say "Micah White"http://t.co/9QMsIFbfRa
(White is a former editor at the magazine Adbusters, which put out the original call for people to organize in lower Manhattan in 2011. His personal website describes him as “the American creator of the Occupy Wall Street meme.”)
Tunney then went after David Graeber:
Also I just want to say that David Grr is a chump. He took credit for everything everyone did. His contribution? Sabotage.
On Twitter, Wedes reacted with humor.
Ruh roh. I've been framed! MT @OccupyWallSt: If u Google search "who founded occupy" it incorrectly says @JustinWedes
For the record, Al Gore invented Occupy Wall Street in 1981.#ifoundedoccupywallst
But the Twitter feed has become a serious issue among Occupy Wall Street’s participants, most of whom have moved on to other causes. It has reopened old wounds dating back from before the occupation of the park, and raised awkward questions about how the movement failed and what it meant in the first place. Tunney has even become the target of a Change.org petition asking her to relinquish management of OccupyWallSt.org’s blog.
The Twitter feed “devolved into irrelevance, like so many others. I haven’t tweeted on it in months since I was summarily excommunicated by Justine,” said Shawn Carrié (whose real last name is Schrader), a New York-based activist who was once heavily involved in the movement.
“We always knew she was trouble, I should’ve taken it away when I had the password,” Carrié said.
“It needs to implode,” Carrié said of Occupy. “It needs to die so something new can be born.”
There is some disagreement over whether the @OccupyWallSt hijacking is indicative of a larger problem, or just an issue with one person.
“This moment indicates with the highest clarity how absolutely dead the Occupy Movement is,” Carrié tweeted earlier on Friday to a former fellow activist who goes by the name of Dicey Troop.
“Yes, but it’s justine’s actions that illustrate that. not the people being like ‘why are you taking our movement from us?’” Troop responded.
Tunney’s been active on her personal Twitter feed, as well, where she’s been directly interacting with some of her targets.
“How about a little solidarity,” she tweeted at Wedes, who called Tunney’s commandeering of the @OccupyWallSt account an “insurrection.”
“What’s your vision? If you want, send a statement & I’ll read it to #TweetBoat on conf call tonight. We’ll craft response,” Wedes said.
“Also what do you mean by ‘response’? Are we rival political factions now, or something?” Tunney said.
“It’s just radical activists doing what radical activists do: get indignant,” Tunney told BuzzFeed in an email when reached for comment. “Nothing has changed.”
Tunney continued:
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