“Young people like me have felt politically powerless for most of their lives. We came of age during the Obama campaign and we were fed the idea that the campaign represented the peak of progressive organizing. Now, my Facebook feed is full of 18 and 20 year-olds who all want to go to an occupation.”
–Guido Girgenti, a student organizer from Occidental College, speaking at the Take Back America conference’s bank accountability panel yesterday in DC.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to more than 200 cities, according to this crowd-sourced list built by longtime netroots blogger/activist Chris Bowers on DailyKos. Later tonight, I hope to have a tally of how many are actually signed up on all those pages, but in the meantime, with the help of Shane Castlen, I can report that the 54 initial groups that I started tracking this weekend have gained another 49,046 “likes” since yesterday at 4:00pm EST. That’s a 21% increase from yesterday’s total of 232,360, a slight slowing in the blistering pace of growth that we’ve been seeing, but hardly much of a dip, and still on track to basically double in size roughly every three days.
UPDATE: Based on a little bit of scraping, we’re currently counting 384,889 sign-ups across the 201 Facebook Occupy groups tallied by DailyKos. Ten locations have more than ten thousand “likes” and 67 of them have more than a thousand.
Facebook “likes” are hardly the same thing as commitments to camp out and hold a city center, but as anyone who has done any online organizing can tell you, they are the raw material for finding and nurturing activists, and with each new “like” dozens of friends are exposed to the spreading message. The Occupy Wall Street presence on Facebook isn’t nearly as large as the Tea Party Patriots, which has nearly 850,000 “likes” on its page, but as on-the-ground actions sprout in more cities, we’ll have a better sense of the Occupy movement’s depth and staying power.
October 04, 2011