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<h1 id="toc_marker-26" class="article-title"><a id="Occupy-Social-NEtworks---the-Paradoxes-of-Corporate--Social-Media-for-Networked--Social-Movements" />Occupy Social Networks: the Paradoxes of Corporate Social Media for Networked Social Movements</h1>
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<h2 class="author-name"><a href="unlike-us-reader-34.xhtml#terranova">138888888</a> and <a href="unlike-us-reader-34.xhtml#donovan">7712</a></h2>
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Since at least 2004, the internet, and more specifically the web, has witnessed a notorious and controversial shift away from the model of the static web page towards a social web or Web 2.0 model where the possibilities of users to interact with the web have multiplied. It has become much easier for a layperson to publish and share texts, images and sounds. A new topology of distribution of information has emerged, based in ‘real’ social networks, but also enhanced by casual and algorithmic connections. Commerce, advertising, and gaming constitute the business models by which social networking platforms monetize users’ attention.
Together with the increasing relevance of mobile and wireless communication, this mutation in the ongoing evolution of the web has profoundly reshaped its culture. Many have argued, however, that this new phase has seen an even more intense embedding of the internet with corporate culture and cognitive capitalism. Corporate social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like not only reintroduce a client-server topology and hence more centralized control, but they also stand accused of other things. The most influential version of this scenario is of course Jodi Dean’s indictment of the social web as something that actually stops people from real actions inasmuch as it keeps users trapped in a circuit of sterile communication, hooked onto small nuggets of enjoyment such as those carried by news, updates, messages, etc.<a id="footnote-309601-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-309601-1">1</a> 
However, we can also think of critics such as Geert Lovink or Sherry Turkle expressing similar concerns, not to speak of the whole onslaught of popular internet critiques by writers such as Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr, and so on. Corporate social networking sites (SNS) are generally condemned, then, for promoting a neoliberal version of subjectivity, narcissistic and voyeuristic, incapable of real intimacy, and ultimately powerless to affect any real social change. As a consequence, there’s a kind of commonsense view developing that social networking platforms produce a kind of armchair activism, where signing a petition or joining a group is a safe and ultimately harmless way to vent one’s anger. Also given the widespread skepticism about ‘Facebook and Twitter Revolutions’ in North Africa, it seems important to talk about some of the practices and experiences which have actually been developed by activists when dealing with corporate SNS in what Donna Haraway once called ‘the belly of the beast’,<a id="footnote-309601-2-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-309601-2">2</a> that is California, USA. 
Joan Donovan is an organizer with Occupy Los Angeles (Occupy LA) and a founding member of the InterOccupy international network of activists. She is also completing her graduate studies in sociology and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, where her research tracks the technologies of social change used by contemporary social movements. 
Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor of Sociology of Communication, Cultural Studies and New Media at the Orientale University, Naples, Italy and director of the PhD Programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies. She is also a member of the free university network Uninomade and author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press: 2004)
Having met at a panel about social media and political movements at a conference of the Italian Association for Science and Technology Studies in Rovigo, Italy, in the summer of 2012, Tiziana and Joan started talking about Joan’s involvement in the Occupy LA movement in relation to Tiziana’s experience with the Italian militant scene. They started this email conversation in the summer of 2012 and met again in Los Angeles in November of the same year, where Tiziana interviewed Joan for the Italian web radio Radio Uninomade.
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Tiziana Terranova: Joan, you were an active member of the Occupy movement in Los Angeles, and were specifically very much involved with the media and communications side of the protest. Can you start by telling us in broad terms what the strategy was and what tactics were used by that movement with relation to corporate social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? 
Joan Donovan: When Occupy LA formed in September 2011, the idea was to use social media as an outreach tool to get people to come to the local occupation, but this has changed as new uses became apparent. A small media committee developed before the occupation settled at Los Angeles City Hall, but quickly expanded as people joined the physical occupation. I have actively declined invitations to become an admin on the Occupy LA Facebook and Twitter accounts for reasons I will discuss later. 
While the Occupy movement initially used Facebook and Twitter to communicate between activists using the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, the search term quickly became impossible to follow as thousands of ‘occupy’ related accounts were registered. To combat the problem of information overload, I helped with the development of an online platform for communication at <a href="http://InterOccupy.net">InterOccupy.net</a>, which uses conference calls and email groups to network occupiers with similar interests. Facebook and Twitter are important for promoting these conference calls and populating our homemade network, but they are not as important to InterOccupy as they are for organizing and developing infrastructure for local movements. There are many reasons for this difference in use of social media. But the main reason is that InterOccupy is most interested in forging internal ties amongst people already invested in the Occupy movement and organizing widespread direct action, while local occupations need to reach many people to make these actions effective and to sway political opinions. 
The tactic of occupation has so many working parts and requires a lot of people power to make it function, so Facebook and Twitter were important tools for recruiting the public and obtaining resources for Occupy LA. An occupation must provide all of the supports that people are accustomed to in their normal life such as clean water, sanitation, food, entertainment etc. We were occupying at City Hall in LA which is about an acre and a half of land, so we needed hundreds of people and tents to fill the space. 
Though there were numerous committees people could join, I was interested in the media committee because of its closed social dynamics compared to the rest of the camp. The media committee began as an insular group and has remained that way more or less. In my opinion, the seclusion has a lot to do with the equipment required to participate, such as mobile phones and computers, and the infrastructure of social media platforms themselves. The media tent was an ever-expanding mesh of large barracks-style canopies perched on a hill next to the City Hall building. During the days of the encampment, you had to be well-liked to get into the media tent so that you could access the generators to charge your laptop or phone. Restricted access to the media tent was justified by appeals to the cost of equipment and the threat of theft. If you gained access to the media tent, (meaning you were known to the person tending the sign-in sheet), it was a mess of loose wires, random computer parts, and attitude. 
In the tent people were managing numerous platforms simultaneously, including Facebook, Twitter, the Occupy Los Angeles website with hundreds of registered users, LiveStream, a YouTube channel, a very active email group, and answering information requests from the media, public, and other occupations. The tasks were endless and the work exhausting as many shuffled around on little to no restful sleep. It is remarkable that within this public space made private, Occupy LA was able to stage a full-time broadcast network capable of communicating across the globe through the use of these corporate social networks who made the ‘Occupy’ message publicly available. 
In one sense, I think you could say that protester’s speech across these networks is made possible by this configuration of private companies having amplified the connectivity between people for the purpose of selling us more products. The mining of information and data for marketing demographics is just one way in which people using these networks are exploited. But, in my own opinion, I think these all-encompassing social networks have paradoxical effects on our lives. You give up a lot in terms of privacy and freedom from the police to participate, but you gain the ability to stay in touch with old friends and make new ones without much effort. It can also feel very rewarding at times. I do agree with you that it makes it very easy for the police, or anyone with minimal skills, to map the network. We should not forget that this was a major challenge for police during the Red Scare, and not having so many points of connectivity to map back then may have saved a lot of people from jail or worse. So, yes, these networks make it easier for state surveillance and there is a lot of political repression in America of Occupy protesters or those that the media has labeled anarchists. 
TT: But there’s also a more general distrust of the social web by those who think that it comes with huge potential for social control. In Italy, for example, the police have easy access to Facebook accounts, and this kind of Facebook policing has become commonplace in murder cases, but we can only assume that it has made it a lot easier for the police to reconstruct the graph of networks of activists, groups of people with dissident ideas etc. At the same time, corporate social networking platforms have become absolutely essential to movements opposing state violence and capitalist power worldwide. This is for the same reason that has made this phenomenon such a huge success in terms of appeal to users: they mobilize real existing social relations, from the strongest to the most tenuous, within a digital milieu that allows for a daily intimacy. And yet all of this comes at a price: a new visibility of the underlying topologies of those social relations. In the case of collective accounts expressing the point of view of a movement, things become even trickier. I can imagine how personal and impersonal relations overlap, and also this difficult kind of becoming visible for networks of dissents. Given these constraints and the threat of policing, how were these networking platforms managed? 
JD: While the walls of the tent may have been one way to exclude people from the media committee, the way that social networks are structured with a single point of entry posed a bigger problem: who has the password? Because you need a password to communicate through those channels, the passwords were vigorously guarded from people who were deemed provocateurs. An elaborate set of rules and requirements developed around access to these passwords, specifically for the Occupy LA Facebook and Twitter accounts, which have tens of thousands of followers. These accounts were operated as a ‘boat’ with about six captains, who decided what would be posted and what would be ignored. If you knew someone who had the passwords, you could approach them in the camp or by email and ask to have something posted. If those people knew you and liked you then you would get your post online. 
There is a difference between operating a single account as a group versus the way we have become accustomed to using Facebook and Twitter as individuals. When the account speaks, the operator is representing the entire mass of people who identify with Occupy LA. But, because Occupy LA had not agreed upon a set of community values and protest tactics, some posts – usually those that supported good relations with the police – left the operator to defend themselves against both online and face-to-face opponents. This made for a hostile environment, where some people with passwords actively concealed their identity after receiving a backlash online. 
If you did not know who to contact, then you had to attend several media committee meetings and repeatedly request access to the accounts. At these meetings, there was a lot of talk about maintaining a ‘unified and coherent’ message for the press and general public. Thus, concerns about the content of ‘the message’ were highly contentious and often derailed meetings into accusations about members’ outside affiliations. 
After lots of complaints about the control of outward communications, a new protocol developed where people could email the media committee and have their action or statements promoted through social media, but only if the actions/statements were agreed upon at the General Assembly. However, this posed a new set of obstacles because the General Assembly is comprised of whoever showed up to the nightly meeting and voted on a specific proposal. Moreover, these meetings could be attended by hundreds of people, which meant minor issues could not be addressed. So effectively, the media committee shifted the burden of regulating communications to the facilitation committee of the General Assembly, who were the ones that decided which proposals would be appropriate to be debated at the nightly meeting. 
As a result of all these hurdles, the Twitter and Facebook communications served to promote the views, actions, and opinions of the small group of admins, who were routinely insulted by other members of Occupy LA who accused them of pushing a ‘reformist agenda’. But, it is true that the opinions of those in Occupy LA who were doggedly anti-authoritarian were often ignored by admins or left to be argued in the stream of comments on the Facebook page. 
TT: This is an interesting dynamics from the point of view of thinking about the implications of using corporate SNS, especially massive ones such as Facebook. Do you think that because it feels so much like a mass medium there is the tendency, or at least the temptation, that whoever manages the account will marginalize other points of view? Do we have something akin to the politics of representation of mass media at work here in a different technology? 
JD: Yes, it was like pre-policing, but as tensions in the media committee boiled over, a group of anarchists developed their own media group and named it Occupy LA Anti-Social Media. In the vein of Anonymous, they routinely posted personal information about the Occupy LA admins via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr without revealing their own identities. Their posts included using the media committee’s real names and linking their places of business or union affiliations in posts. However, the anonymity of this group did not extend to their offline presence at Occupy LA. At one point, the Occupy LA Anti-Social Media group used the General Assembly strategically to prevent the ‘official’ media committee from issuing press releases. Before this, the media committee was relatively free to issue press releases that were agreed upon during their regular meetings; the Anti-Social Media Group sought to have all press releases be agreed to by the General Assembly with 100% consensus. This meant that all press releases could be blocked or amended by members of Occupy LA Anti-Social Media without having to attend the ‘official’ media committee meetings. Therefore, it could be up to 48 hours before a press release was issued, making any response to a mainstream media story ineffective. The online personal attacks (which led to animated physical confrontations), coupled with the loss of the camp, led to most of the original Facebook and Twitter admins giving up and leaving the media committee and Occupy LA. 
Interestingly, the loss of the camp revealed a lot about the motivations of many in the media committee. Subsequently, we found out that some who were using the media committee’s resources, such as power and access to Wi-Fi, never intended on sharing the video footage they captured during the days of the camp; they were either embedded mainstream media who were filming for a private company, others were paid by unions to push a certain agenda, or they were independent documentary filmmakers who seemed to disappear with the camp. Consequently, the accusations made by Occupy LA Anti-Social Media that some were motivated by money or were being paid to control the message were true, but during the camp days the warnings went unheeded. This split seems to be characteristic of occupations in general and was extremely similar to what happened in 1968 according to the Situationists, where the media committee was staffed by amateur journalists seeking employment. In addition, as Occupy LA became less of a news story, it was just not very exciting to be on the media committee. For some that remained, if they had not been pushed out, they left when attention faded. 
This is when I started doing interviews with media outlets, including The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Ms. Magazine and so on, to fill the gap left by those moved on from Occupy LA, in addition to working in internal communications across occupations. Being in touch with mainstream media outlets is stressful though, as you never know what small piece of what you say will be published and you can certainly never be sure of how they will describe you. But I felt that engaging the media is important for showing people that the movement is still working even after severe police repression. As a sociologist, I was interested in knowing more about how the mainstream media worked, so I often had many questions for the reporters who were usually very happy to talk about their process. 
TT: So, you eventually got involved with talking to the media, but outside the confinement of the committee structure. How has using corporate SNS benefited the Occupy movement? 
During the camp and presently, Twitter and Facebook as well as LiveStream are instrumental for getting the word out about actions and also bringing in new people and resources. Imagine how much work it would be to try to create a social media platform with all the capabilities of Twitter and Facebook (such as posting and sharing massive amounts of data) coupled with the scope of the network itself with tens of millions potential points of contact. There is no reason for trying to duplicate such an immense resource, but it is advantageous to build a network of protesters alongside these platforms, like InterOccupy has done, so that the internal flow of information can be verified and channeled appropriately. While many people use social media networks like Twitter and Facebook every day to enrich their lives, activists can use these channels to raise awareness and crowdsource funds, resources, and allies. 
For example, the LiveStream provided those who might have been timid about joining the occupation a safe vantage point to view what happened at the occupation. The LiveStream was often promoted using the Facebook and Twitter accounts. On the night of the raid by the Los Angeles Police Department, while tens of thousands watched the live action clash with the police online, thousands of newcomers descended upon the camp. Several remarked to me that this was their first time at the camp, but that they watched online daily and felt an affinity with certain people who frequently broadcasted on the stream. This kind of identification and personalization of the occupiers with the online audience was integral to funneling resources to the camp as those watching at home could feel a sense of participation by sending money, blankets, pizza, and water to the camp in place of their physical presence. However, when time came for the camp’s denouement, some of the audience chose live action over a passive role. 
Social media networks becoming obligatory facts of our everyday lives makes it possible for a very small group with a troubled infrastructure, like Occupy LA, to become politically influential if they can capture the attention of enough people. To affect local politics though, these networks need to manifest in a corporeal form. One thing that has not changed with social media is that politicians must literally see that their constituents are invested in these issues, otherwise the politicians will not be swayed to support our cause. This is why occupation made sense as a tactic, with online tools for sharing information aiding in organizing a public with a vast range of opinions and ideas. With the aid of some hashtags, #OccupyLA and #OccupyWallStreet, we developed into Occupy Los Angeles, a loose community of seasoned activists, disaffected youth, and disenfranchised citizens. This is not to suggest that people only heard about Occupy LA through the internet, but these networks and search terms were integral to getting the public organized and co-located at City Hall. 
As the online network grew, so did the number of people visiting the camp and joining the occupation. The online community grew much more rapidly than the occupation itself. All told, at the height of the occupation, about 2,000 people were living on the grounds of City Hall, which is not really a critical mass compared to the population of LA. However, the online reach of Occupy LA now stands at 52 thousand people on Facebook and 28 thousand on Twitter, which helps the movement sustain itself when occupying public space is not an option. 
Ultimately, leveraging networks already in place seems to be an important factor in whether new social movements get off the ground, i.e. how they enroll new allies and garner mainstream media attention. But managing the community that materializes within and out of those networks is rather messy, especially when the community has a diversity of opinions and wants access to the means of broadcasting their ideas. This is all to suggest that while the Occupy movement received sizable cash donations and spent most of the money on bail, one of the most valuable outcomes of the camps continues to be the networks of people united by their experiences and ability to wield hashtags like weapons. 
TT: You are describing very interesting dynamics. It seems clear that a movement such as Occupy LA has used corporate social media as broadcasting media to interact both with mainstream media and with a potential public of millions. This has involved several problems, insofar as the Twitter and Facebook accounts expressed what were the ‘official’ views of the movement, and hence had to be severely restricted and connected to the assemblies in ways that made their use very controlled, and at the same time, quite controversial. While many efforts went into guarding the passwords to those accounts, it seemed that it was the very structure of those accounts, of that kind of mass, corporate social network, that made it liable to some kind of manipulation by media quasi-professionals! It seems to me that you are pointing to an interesting phenomenon: corporate social networking platforms are the new mass media; they are giving you access to a potentially mass public and carrying over all of the issues inherent in communicating with a mass public to a new technological interface and protocol.
In Italy I have also noticed something similar to what you’ve described: group accounts or accounts which express the view of a collective are indeed very awkward media to use! They involve multiple levels of organization: on the one hand, the relay with the collective whose views they are expressing, and on the other, the internal dynamics of the group running the account, and finally, the interaction with the users posting comments to the account or retweeting etc. In Italy, the use of corporate SNS, in spite of the hostility of many activists and militants against corporations, has been quite intensive with a strong presence of anti-racist networks, student protest movements, precarious workers, and environmental struggles such as the No TAV movement in Northern Italy, on Facebook and Twitter. Less strong is the presence of work and labor-related issues. This active use of corporate SNS, I believe, has allowed Italian social movements to develop a kind of online culture where social relations between people who know each other offline have been consolidated, while new, more fleeting relationships are formed. 
The event app on Facebook has also proven crucial. What we have here is not so much mass mobilization over time, but a proliferation of small events, often built around occupied spaces (such as theatres, schools, universities and all kinds of spaces left empty and dismissed by the budget cuts in local administration and general neglect). In a city like Naples, traditionally being a hot bed of militant left activism that also holds a strong cultural presence in the city (especially with musicians who got started within this culture), this has resulted in a kind of revitalization of common life, that at the same time has not led to the kind of mass uprisings that some people would wish for given the state of things (austerity, debt economy, privatization, unemployment, corruption etc.) At the same time, the general mood of what we could call ‘the Italian Facebook’, following Daniel Miller’s statement on the importance of referring to Facebook specifically,<a id="footnote-309601-3-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-309601-3">3</a> is more inflected by the affect of anger and indignation directed at politicians than more structural economic and political issues. It is also possible to see how Facebook works in redesigning our political culture in the way a certain language, which we could define as ‘troll-like’, is emerging: aggressive, direct, popular.
So I would first like to ask you in which way you believe that communicating to a virtual mass public and mainstream media on social networking platforms is different from the more direct relation with the mainstream press, and how these two modes of media strategy interact? What were the features, for example, of the sociality of such platforms that you encountered or witnessed in comments etc.? Secondly, what do you think of the anti-social media activities during those times?
JD: I think you are right that there are three levels of organization, but they are all framed within how the platform itself channels communication. One thing that I noticed initially about the interaction between the general accounts and the commenters was that Facebook allowed for more dialogue to develop between many users, while Twitter focused the discussion between the account and the commenter more directly. In fact, when arguments developed on Twitter and more than four people got involved, it was nearly impossible to follow or provide a detailed response. In these situations the discussion would switch to Facebook or to the Occupy LA email list. When that failed, the discussion would come before the General Assembly or a special meeting would be held to address the issue. While you would never see a headline in the mainstream media that reads: ‘Eighty Activists Meet Downtown to Address a Facebook Post’, it was often the case that online communications and offline communications were held to the same standards of community accountability. 
An early occasion of this involved the formation of The Committee to End Police Brutality, which consisted of about fifteen people who wanted to hold meetings that addressed police violence. Because the General Assembly runs on 100% consensus, this committee was blocked from forming by some of the more liberal police sympathizers. Those who wanted to form the committee did so anyway through a Facebook group called ‘The Committee to End Police Brutality at Occupy LA’. This act of forming online when the General Assembly refused to sanction them angered one man so much that he printed out the members list from Facebook and began handing them out at the General Assembly. As the flyers circulated, people began screaming about the targeting of activists by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Of course, at that time, no one knew who had made the flyers, so the cops were the first suspects. Later, the person who made the flyers admitted it via email and was ostracized even by those who did not agree with the committee. There was quite a bit of symbiosis between the online and offline social worlds that led to both deeper confrontations and some heartfelt resolutions.
Also, there was an issue with internal communications that was never really addressed that compounded the problems with Facebook and Twitter. For example, while I never thought about the Occupy LA Twitter or Facebook as representatives of the movement, just as I do not view the missives of the bureaucracy at my university as representative of my views, others who were invested in the ideology of horizontalism obviously did view the social media accounts as having a kind of representational power over the General Assembly. But because there was no way to hold people accountable to the General Assembly, as the camp grew so did the concerns about the online accounts being mismanaged and the media committee developing their own hierarchy. This perspective of social media as representative of group identity definitely affected what content was deemed fit for broadcast and discussion, both online and in the camp. Importantly, those ideas certainly affected who was selected to speak to the mainstream media, but control over who spoke to the mainstream media was only possible when interviews were away from the campsite. 
TT: At the campsite, there was less control of the contact between occupiers and mainstream media than through online contact? 
JD: Life at the camp was, in a word, chaos. When it became apparent that the City was going to shut down the camp, there were many reporters who showed up and interviewed anyone willing to talk. Additionally, by the end of the camp many began to devalue the roles of the General Assembly and committees in favor of doing whatever they wanted in the name of Occupy LA to get media attention. For instance, one afternoon a small group wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to address the Occupy Movement and they decided to hold a press conference to announce it. Many in the camp would have disagreed with such a statement, but somehow the press conference was tweeted out and announced on Facebook. This was the first time that the national mainstream media showed up, including CNN. This enraged those on the media committee who were staunchly opposed to the American government. Luckily for them, the press conference was not aired on any news stations because the letter itself was difficult to understand and full of embellished rhetorical statements. I think the mainstream media could tell there was deception afoot. 
In sharp contrast to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, where there were some definitive leaders who represented the collective, Occupy remains leaderless. In the current situation, the mainstream media has trouble connecting to and narrativizing the Occupy movement because of its leaderless and decentralized principles. There is simply no one to contact for an authoritative interview about the movement. As well, organizers in the civil rights movement wanted to report accurately to the media, so that their stories would be covered more often. They did not want to overestimate their numbers or exaggerate the facts, but with Occupy LA the relationship with the mainstream media was strained from early on. In some instances it seemed like the media did not want to report on what we were actually doing, especially with the LA Times who often reported more about what they smelled in the camp than our large-scale actions. Other press outlets such as Russia Today and Al Jazeera reported more sympathetic accounts of the camp though. Russia Today were often in the media tent at the camp charging their cameras and talking to people about the movement. One reporter, Eddie Saade, from Al Jazeera slept several nights in the camp to get a feel for the community and he wrote a fair piece about it.
TT: How would you characterize the coverage of Occupy LA by the mainstream media compared to that by Occupy LA? 
JD: Nothing was more telling about the mainstream media’s coverage of Occupy LA than their focus on the camp’s eviction. Many of us at the camp knew the raid was coming because we were friendly with the cleaning crew of City Hall. The cleaning crew was called and told not to come into work for the night. They relayed the info to us so that we could ready the masses, which included making sure homeless persons were escorted to a safer area and those with immigration problems had time to pack their things. Someone put together a Facebook event page for the ‘Eviction Block Party‘ and over 20,000 people were invited. Your point about the importance of the Facebook event feature is true of the American Occupy movement as well. Being able to spread the word about an action to thousands of people without spending any money is incredibly important for networked social movements with few resources. As well, the event feature provides a space for dialogue so that participants can fine-tune the action, set up a code of conduct, and arrange transportation. 
Hours before the eviction a limited number of media press passes were issued by the LAPD. Most were snatched up quickly by outlets who often covered the LAPD in a favorable way. So, outlets that were friendlier to the LAPD were able to grab footage from inside the camp, while other outlets, such as independent bloggers, streamers, and the Occupy LA media committee, were barred from covering the event with the threat of arrest. Eventually, all of the press were moved to the opposite side of the street when things got ugly and protesters who had climbed trees were being shot with rubber bullets. 
All things considered, I thought the Occupy LA media committee did a good job that night of holding it together, filming as many arrests as possible, and publicizing information about bail. #OccupyLA was trending on Twitter and the admins were pushing minute by minute updates from the camp, so that people following could either find a way out of police blockades or into the camp if they so desired. All told, 1,400 police stormed the camp and 292 people were arrested that night. While the mainstream media portrayed the LAPD as heroes for showing restraint, those who were arrested tell a different story of malicious officers excited by the opportunity to twist arms and legs. Post-raid, those who were previously critical of the media committee were relentless on Facebook and Twitter when commenting on the fact that not many on the media committee were arrested and that many of the streamers left the area after the first order to disperse. However, I am unsure if these critics take into account how important Twitter has become in directing the mobile masses during large-scale actions and that those feeds are operated by real people, who need to stay out of jail to remain effective.
Overall, the current mainstream media does not have a way to view the Occupy movement from the periphery. In order to understand it, they need to be embedded within it. While they are used to obtaining press releases and dealing with representatives with talking points in hand, occupiers eschew representation in many different ways. This makes it difficult for journalists to create a metanarrative and for academics to develop informative petits récits about the movement. Simply put, there is a dearth of traditional access points. 
Perhaps the importance of paid journalists is now waning, as embedded bloggers tend to have more accurate and reliable firsthand accounts. When you are enmeshed in those social networks or if you know the right keywords, it is not difficult to find informative blog posts about direct actions from the point of view of the public. Also, juxtaposing many accounts of a single event in different formats from text to visual is now possible. In these contemporary social movements there is a substantial amount of the ‘free labor’ you have written about, where the work of creating and facilitating the movement is unpaid yet spontaneous and rewarding.<a id="footnote-309601-4-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-309601-4">4</a> Granted, some have been able to finance their activism through donations, and electronic transfers of cash have greatly altered how money circulates within movements. 
Back to the question about the mainstream press though, they have a relationship to people in power such as the City Council, the Mayor, and the police that grants them privileged access and legitimates the stories they decide to tell. It is their framing of the situation with verbal and visual cues of ‘violent protesters’ that sets in motion an apparatus of state oppression acceptable by the public-at-large. The task of independent social media is to switch that perception and show that Occupy is not just a ‘non-violent movement’, but rather, it is a ‘peaceful assembly’. Because Occupy’s largest access point to the public is corporate social media sites, these are channels that must be used to counter negative press. However, the use of corporate SNS allows the movement to link to counter-narratives located in other non-corporate spaces. 
In any case, I would like to return to an earlier point you made about the networks solidifying old ties between people who already know each other offline and those that form online. I have witnessed a lot of online ‘drama’ play out where the argument hinges on someone’s ability to mobilize more support online for their position. It’s like an online version of tyranny of the majority, where some people are scared to voice their opinions online. The tone of the speech online seems to be much more divisive than that of the assemblies too. Still at Occupy LA, we attempt to have open face-to-face meetings to discuss these problems or difficult issues, which have kept some great organizers from leaving over petty problems. Lately, this has shifted to attempting to remove argumentative and attention seeking people (trolls) from online forums, but there is no way to ban them from public spaces. So, the online space with the help of admins is easier to make homogeneous than the heterogeneous space of the commons. There is an important basic sociological point to be made here that groups thrive when they have consistent and well-articulated values that bond the members, but the main problem of the Occupy movement has been its extremely broad base and inconsistency in maintaining group values. This has led to many problems maintaining group solidarity. 
In this situation, I think the thesis that SNS leads to more social isolation is probably true for some people. But for me, I must say it is not true. Throughout an average day, I use about ten different networking tools to communicate with other Occupy protesters: phone, Twitter, Facebook, websites, texts messages, video streams, conference calls, email, IRC, and Tumblr. It is a lot to manage and some is certainly more entertainment than involvement. There will always be people who experience this kind of pluralized connectivity as completely overwhelming. In my own research, I call this rhizomatic communication because of its many points of entry and contact. The most important way to guard against the Occupy network becoming too centralized or effacing the promise of horizontalism is to maintain the way our communication infrastructure is spread out across many different corporate and non-corporate networks. So, the only recourse for police is to attempt to pluck the nodes of the rhizome, one by one, but where one is squashed another sprouts. 
TT: Yes, that is a feature of the underlying architecture of the internet, the internet protocol, that is difficult to undercut completely, even in these centralizing times. But how has the issue of corporate ownership of data produced by users affected the Occupy movement? 
JD: Weirdly, when Twitter and Google ended their contract and the public became unable to search through tweets using Google Replay, it also became harder for the police to take out the key actors in new social movements. One occupier, Malcolm Harris, arrested in September 2011 along with 700 other protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, had his Twitter account subpoenaed by the New York Court under suspicion that he was somehow directing people on to the bridge. Now Twitter is using its own lawyers to fight the case saying that these tweets, which were once public, are now protected by the Stored Communications Act. At first, Harris and his lawyer attempted to defend against this search and were told that he did not own the tweets anymore, Twitter did. Obviously Twitter does not agree with that because it would effectively make them responsible for the content of everyone’s speech on their site, which would lead to much more trouble.
I don’t know how this will end, but Twitter only allows you to see about 3,200 of a user’s most recent tweets, maybe even less now. As well, even when a tweet is deleted, if it was once published, it remains in Twitter’s archive. The saying, ‘The internet is forever’, is very true in the case of Twitter, who now sells access to its archive for a very hefty sum. Critically, this court decision will dictate how far the gaze of surveillance can reach into someone’s online social world. But for many activists, using Twitter or SNS in general to coordinate direct actions comes with the assumption that all the wires are tapped. 
TT: So at the end of it all, or maybe still in the middle, and returning to our initial question: from your perspective, can corporate social networking platforms constitute valuable tools to organize dissent or do they tend to neutralize it in limited acts of virtual dissent? What is the value of corporate social media for anti-corporate social movements?
JD: There is a definite contradiction in the use of corporate social media for movements like Occupy, 15M, and Take Back the Square. There is also a lot of discussion about how to build our own software, tools, and even hardware. But this is where movements with few resources run into major problems. It’s not just that you need finance to start up, but the maintenance of servers and cost of materials can be staggering. For instance, the site <a href="http://OccupyLosAngeles.org">OccupyLosAngeles.org</a> was bought from GoDaddy.com for about $12 for a year. Because an individual bought it with their credit card, they, not the collective, are entitled to renew it. This person is now asking for $2,000 to sell it to Occupy LA. Right now Occupy LA does not have the funds to purchase it, so the public facing web page will probably disappear soon. However, because so many are invested in circulating information about Occupy LA through Facebook and Twitter, this is just a kink in the chain of communication. 
Also, this class war is not just about mobilizing people in the streets, it is also about access to information. The role of Anonymous and WikiLeaks in politicizing the internet as a space to be fought over has given many activists insight into the importance to truthful intelligence about American politics. In addition, if Web 2.0 is about connecting people’s real identities together and bridging offline networks with online lives, then the option of remaining anonymous is essential for those who are mobilizing on the margins of legality. However, given the constant logging of IP addresses and the integration of mobile phones with GPS, it is becoming more and more difficult to organize untraceably outside of corporate spaces. 
Given these conditions, many in the Occupy movement yield to the already built communication infrastructures of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube because they are familiar, useful, and give access to the broadest possible audience. Critically, this is not to the exclusion of building and populating our own networks. InterOccupy has been working on providing a batch of tools and a series of hubs for coordinating distributed direct actions internationally. InterOccupy initially developed out of the New York City General Assembly’s Movement Building Committee, who convened a conference call in October of 2011 with nearly eighty encampments on the same call. It was not obvious that local occupations desired to coordinate until some started suffering police repression and a need to share tactics developed. Also, email had failed to unite the movement as numerous email lists developed, but users quickly became overburdened by the volume of communications. Conference calling allowed for real-time dialogue with people who could be questioned to ascertain the veracity of their claims. 
As a matter of telling the history of InterOccupy, it is crucial to understand that I can only provide one perspective at the moment. Each encampment that decided to reach out to others did so for very specific reasons. For instance, Occupy LA was centrally located near approximately twenty other camps. I began traveling to San Diego, Irvine, and Long Beach in early October to help these assemblies avoid the pitfalls we encountered in LA, such as dealing with the medical needs of the homeless, gaining the approval of City Council, and acquiring enough food to feed everyone. I didn’t expect to be mainly dealing with identifying provocateurs. 
When Occupy San Diego was under extreme police pressure and facing eviction, a man kept interrupting the General Assembly stating that he was from Zuccotti Park and that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was sending ‘1,000 people to [Occupy San Diego] to fortify their camp’. I did not think that was possible given what I read on blogs about the amount of people and funds in New York, but I had no way to prove it. When I dropped in on Occupy Long Beach the next day I heard a very similar claim about OWS sending people to Occupy San Francisco, who were also battling the cops. A friend at Occupy Los Angeles put me on the phone with his brother at OWS, who quickly confirmed that these were rumors. At that point, I knew that the best way to combat infiltration was going to involve building a robust online and offline network that allowed for all types of communication to flourish: face-to-face, phone, discussion boards, IRC, websites, social media, and so on. As luck would have it, I was contacted by the Movement Building committee around the same time. It was with members of the Movement Building working group in NYC, as well as members of various other occupations, that we were able to rapidly develop the communication infrastructure of InterOccupy and build solidarity across the movement. 
Ironically, because the Occupy movement is comprised of local autonomous assemblies it was difficult to construct a trusted private social network because of fears of co-option and centralization of the means of communication. InterOccupy is managed by a group of about ten volunteers who engage with daily maintenance and about fifty others who help with tasks. InterOccupy has always remained an open group and publicly advertises how new volunteers can engage. Despite this openness, it was disheartening to read people’s comments on our website saying that InterOccupy ‘must be financed and staffed by the FBI’. Others in Facebook comments accused InterOccupy of being ‘a front group for the Obama campaign’. Of course, none of this has turned out to be true, but I was also leery of some people’s motivation after my experiences with Occupy LA. However, it may be true that actions organized through InterOccupy are less radical than those coordinated in face-to-face meetings as it is difficult to develop trust over the telephone. 
Over the last year though, InterOccupy has helped organize the May First General Strike, the West Coast Port Shutdown, the Anti-ALEC protests, OWS’s anniversary celebration and the Global Noise initiative, among many other actions. We also used some of the tools of InterOccupy to help spread information about the Quebec Student Strike that led to many global solidarity protests. For Occupy and other networked social movements, the question is not about whether corporate social media is good or bad, but rather how can we leverage all available communication tools and infrastructures to inform the public and bring them into our networks. Ultimately, activists pay the price in terms of privacy when initiatives for social change are promoted through corporate social media, but this may be a problem of online and mobile coordination more generally. Just as they build apparatuses of surveillance, we must develop the tools to undo them. For now, the trade-off of using corporate networks is the capacity to build a social movement with very few monetary resources by reaching and resonating with people all over the world. In the future, we hope to undo the need for them too. 
<h6 class="references_title">References</h6>
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.
Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: FA Press, 1991.
Miller, Daniel. Tales from Facebook, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.
Terranova, Tiziana. ‘Free Labor’ in Tiziana Terranova, Network Cullture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004.
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<h6 class="references_title">Notes</h6>
<div class="footnote">
<a id="footnote-309601-1" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-309601-1-backlink">1</a>.&#9;Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.
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<a id="footnote-309601-2" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-309601-2-backlink">2</a>.&#9;Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: FA Press, 1991.
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<div class="footnote">
<a id="footnote-309601-3" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-309601-3-backlink">3</a>.&#9;Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.
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<div class="footnote">
<a id="footnote-309601-4" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-309601-4-backlink">4</a>.&#9;Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor’ in Tiziana Terranova, Network Cullture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004. 
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