Occupy vs Tea Party: what their Twitter networks reveal

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

According to some political commentators, Occupy Wall Street is the left's answer to the Tea Party - driven by a similar anger towards elites. But the social networks of people tweeting about the two movements suggest that they have rather different dynamics.
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Those tweeting about the Tea Party emerge as a tight-knit "in crowd", following one another's tweets. By contrast, the network of people tweeting about Occupy consists of a looser series of clusters, in which the output of a few key people is being vigorously retweeted.

The Occupy network also has many casual unconnected tweeters, shown to the bottom right of the diagram below. Whether Occupy takes off as a coherent movement may depend on its success in bringing these potential recruits into the fold.
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(Image: Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation)

This view of how the two movements are impacting the Twitterverse comes from Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation in Belmont, California. "These are very differently organised groups," he says. "Occupy is much more diffuse and diverse."

Smith has analysed tweets containing "occupywallstreet" or "teaparty", drawing connections between the Twitter users involved if one follows one other (shown in grey), or if they retweeted, replied or mentioned one another (shown in blue).

The Occupy network above visualises almost 1400 tweets posted in less than 30 minutes on 15 November. The size of each user depends on their number of followers. The clusters, with users shown in different colours, are defined by an algorithm that looks for "islands" after subtracting the influence of people who "bridge" different parts of the network.

Occupy's clusters look like a series of firework explosions, as supporters retweet the posts of a few key individuals and organisations. The blue cluster at the bottom left, for instance, is formed around activist filmmaker Michael Moore ; the orange cluster immediately above is centred on the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The equivalent Tea Party network for 15 November, analysing a similar number of tweets posted over about three hours, looks rather different:

(Image: Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation)

Here there are two main clusters, the blue one on the left containing Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and his supporters. (The diffuse cluster in the lower centre of the diagram consists not of Tea Party supporters, but critics of the movement from the political left.)

Compared to Occupy, the Tea Party supporters have a much denser network of following relationships. "The Tea Party is an 'in group' thing," Smith argues. But for now, at least, the conversation within this group is muted compared to that surrounding Occupy - not only is the rate of tweets much slower, but fewer of the relationships show up in blue, indicating an active response to a post.

Do these patterns represent fundamental differences in the social structure of the two movements, or are we just looking at the contrast between a movement in the first flush of public and media attention, and one that has matured over a couple of years? That's not clear, but Smith intends to keep taking his snapshots to see how the networks evolve.

One key pattern to watch will be the number of disconnected Twitter users at the bottom right of each diagram. These can be viewed as the potential for growth for each movement, Smith suggests. Right now, that looks large for Occupy, and not so impressive for the Tea Party.
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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1a2c6171/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A110C110Coccupy0Evs0Etea0Eparty0Ewhat0Etheir0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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