We advance social movement and diffusion theories by exploring the role of online activities in the spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The results from event history analyses suggest that, after controlling for community characteristics, online activities on Facebook and Twitter are associated with the spread of protests. The association is stronger for Facebook than other Internet-enabled technologies. The importance of Facebook activities increases over time, but the importance of community characteristics such as population size decreases over time. While intermunicipal contagion does not affect the diffusion process directly, it affects the diffusion in combination with online activities: the effect of spatial proximity to prior sites of contention increases in cities where Facebook activities preexist. The results provide a better understanding of how the Internet and social media activity create new communication channels among potential sites of contention and facilitate the rapid diffusion of contentious collective actions across wide areas.

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How does adolescent organizational membership in general, and simultaneous membership in distinct types of organizations in particular, impact drinking behavior? While past studies have focused either on the learning effect of involvement with gangs or on the constraining influence of conventional organizations on adolescent problem behavior, we explore the possibility that conventional school clubs can serve as socializing opportunities for existing gang members to engage in drinking behavior with non-gang club members. Using the Add Health data, we show that gang members drink more often, and engage in more binge drinking, than non-members. More importantly, individuals who are members of both gangs and school clubs drink alcohol at greater levels than those who are solely involved in gangs. In addition, non-gang adolescents who are co-members with gang members in the same school club are more likely to drink alcohol than non-members. This result has important implications for understanding the role of organizations in adolescent behavior and suggests that the study of delinquent behaviors would benefit from devoting more attention to individuals who bridge distinct types of organizations.