The Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements are fighting for their own ideals of a better, more just, America. For months, both movements have chosen Twitter as their battleground and, according to a new study, they each fight differently.
There are telling differences between the two. OWS twitterers are more diverse and casual participators while the Tea Party Twitter users are more conservative and “tight-knit,” according to a new study from New Scientist, an international science magazine.
The study looked at about 1,400 tweets featuring “occupywallstreet” or “teaparty” during a 30 minute period on Nov. 15, observing how many interactions are made, who the big players are and how many “casual unconnected tweeters” there are for each movement.
“Compared to Occupy, the Tea Party supporters have a much denser network of following relationships,” reported the study. “[T]he conversation within this group is muted compared to that surrounding Occupy.”
In other words, the Tea Party twitterers chose to interact more with people they know than with those they don’t. Whereas OWS twitterers are making new connections on a regular basis, and conversing more frequently with their influencers.
The study also provides infographics from scientist Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation showing who is being mentioned most. For example, the OWS infographic shows how @occupywallstnyc, filmmaker Michael Moore (@mmflint) and Anonymous hacker Twitter accounts, like @AnonymousIRC, are the biggest influencers.
The study draws some interesting conclusions but in the end, is merely scratching the surface.
For starters, the phrases “occupywallstreet” and “teaparty” are only two of a huge number of tags used by both movements. For example, the hashtag #tcot (which stands for “top conservatives on Twitter”) has been a major unifying force for Tea Party members, collecting more than 400,000 mentions in just the last month. The same goes for #ows which has been mentioned more than three million times since Nov. 12.
And without taking these other Twitter hashtags and phrases into account, a truly accurate social media profile of these movements cannot be done.
On the other hand, this study shows how deft and organized both movements are in rallying their supporters and getting out information.
Photo by david_shankbone