Though Occupy Wall Street-related tweets are coming from a variety of different sources, it appears that a sizable minority are aimed at the same target.
Nearly one-quarter of tweets using the hashtag "#OWS" discussed tax increases for millionaires, according to research firm NM Incite. Other popular Occupy Wall Street twitter topics include "justice," which was mentioned in 20 percent of the tweets and "jobs," which came up in 18 percent of #OWS tweets.
The Occupy movement's focus on tax increases for millionaires mirrors the concerns of the American public at large. Nearly three-quarters of Americans said in September that they support President Obama's proposal to tax households making $1 million or more at the same or higher rate as middle-class Americans, according to a poll by DailyKos.
Close to two-thirds of respondents in a CBS News poll last month said that millionaires should pay more in taxes in order to close the budget deficit. In a more recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, three fifths of Americans said the country's economic structure favors a "very small portion of the rich."
And it's not just ordinary Americans who want to raise taxes on the super-rich. Most millionaires support raising taxes on themselves. Sixty-eight percent of millionaires support raising taxes on households making $1 million or more, the WSJ reported last month.
Ironically, some of the topics that have come to most define the Occupy movement appear toward the bottom of NM Incite's list of Twitter mentions. Only two percent of #ows-related tweets discussed financial reform, the survey found, though occupy activists voiced their anger at banks Saturday as part of "Bank Transfer Day," -- a social media push to encourage customers to pull their money out of banks and put it into credit unions or other alternative lenders.
Though "elimination of the corporate state" ranks at the top of the 99 percent declaration -- a document that includes a call for a national convention among other things -- "separation of corporation and state" only netted five percent of Twitter mentions, according to the survey.
Regardless of the topic, positive Occupy Wall Street mentions outnumbered negative Twitter mentions of the movement by a two-to-one margin, according to separate analysis by NM Incite released last month. And those tweets are hitting a pretty wide audience. Occupy Wall Street has surpassed teen phenom Justin Bieber as the most popular story on Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center's Project For Excellence In Journalism.
Check out a graphic from NM Incite of the most popular #ows-related Twitter topics below:
