Structural Patterns of the Occupy Movement on Facebook

TL;DR

This study analyzes Facebook pages of the Occupy Movement, revealing that activity is driven by city-linked hubs rather than local coordination, with network backbone structures confirming these patterns.

Contribution

It uncovers the global hub-driven structure of Occupy Movement Facebook activity and introduces backbone network analysis to identify key pages and user interactions.

Findings

Activities are driven by city-linked hub pages.

Network backbone analysis reveals key pages and user groups.

Local geographic proximity is less influential than hub connectivity.

Abstract

In this work we study a peculiar example of social organization on Facebook: the Occupy Movement -- i.e., an international protest movement against social and economic inequality organized online at a city level. We consider 179 US Facebook public pages during the time period between September 2011 and February 2013. The dataset includes 618K active users and 753K posts that received about 5.2M likes and 1.1M comments. By labeling user according to their interaction patterns on pages -- e.g., a user is considered to be polarized if she has at least the 95% of her likes on a specific page -- we find that activities are not locally coordinated by geographically close pages, but are driven by pages linked to major US cities that act as hubs within the various groups. Such a pattern is verified even by extracting the backbone structure -- i.e., filtering statistically relevant weight heterogeneities -- for both the pages-reshares and the pages-common users networks.