A Marxist and an Anarchist Walk into the Occupy Movement: internal and external communication practices of radical left groups

The uprisings that occurred around the world in 2011 (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the Spanish Indignados/15M), as well as subsequent protest movements in Brazil (2013) and Turkey (2013–2014), have been characterised as social media revolutions due to the use by participants of online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook (Castells 2012; Mason 2012). A number of studies, however, have shown that this is often an inaccurate representation and that traditional forms of communication, such as face-to-face interaction, together with traditional older forms of online media (such as e-mail networks, fora, websites), are considered by participants to be more central to these events than newer social media (Fuchs 2014a, 85).