Occupy Wall Street: A New Political Form of Movement and Community?

This article analyzes the political form of Occupy Wall Street on Twitter. Drawing on evidence contained within the profiles of over 50,000 Twitter users, political identities of participants are characterized using natural language processing. The results find evidence of a traditional oppositional social movement alongside a legitimizing countermovement, but also a new notion of political community as an ensemble of discursive practices that are endogenous to the constitution of political regimes from the "inside out." These new political identities are bound by thin ties of political solidarity linked to the transformative capacities of the movement rather than thick ties of social solidarity.