Luis F. Alvarez-Leon, Johannes Paßmann, Johan Söderberg MICROFINANCING THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

OBJECTIVE Track the different types of financial transactions present in websites related to a particular issue. We chose Occupy Wall Street as a movement and set out to track the different payment systems its related websites use to collect funds.

Graph by Justin Elliott

METHODOLOGY top sites according to Blekko for the word ”OWS” 2. Source Code Search for the string ” which indicates a secure financial transaction on the site. 3. After removing links pointing to Twitter, Facebook etc., we got 69 sites with ” leading to financial transactions. 4. On the remaining pages, we found the following payment services...

OTHER

PAYPAL NETWORK FOR GOOD WEPAY WIKILEAKS OCCUPY

FINDINGS 1.WePay is the single dominant payment system used by OWS-related websites. 2. Paypal is the second, but overshadowed by the aggregate of others. 3. Low use of PayPal could be due to OWS's protest vs. PayPal and banks. Hence: WePay as alternative payment.

4.Top site, by far was with more than a million visits at its peak in Oct Four others also had high traffic, but all much lower (in the range of 85,000 to about 300,000 visits at their peak also in Oct 2011).

5. Out of the top 5 sites by traffic, only (the top site) and have any donation buttons in their source code. We infer that the top sites in terms of traffic within the OWS movement are for information and diffusion purposes mainly. Fund collection presumably concentrated in local branches (lower traffic sites). This is consistent with the decentralized nature we have observed in the formation of OWS and its different offspring.

Luis F. Alvarez-Leon, Johannes Paßmann, Johan Söderberg Summer School 2012 Digital Methods Amsterdam