The economic crisis that hit Spain with unprecedented social consequences since 2008 has brought massive reactions of citizens contending anti-austerity policy and it has also raised public concern on the responsiveness of the political system and its closeness to corporate interests. Responses involve materialistic grievances such as opposing cuts to social services and house evictions, but also non-materialistic grievances regarding political representation or popular sovereignty. Responses have also taken many forms and have evolved since 2011 as citizens have used multiple repertoires with different levels of innovation and contentiousness. This paper questions to what extent public support of protest is conditioned by understandings of the crisis. It draws on evidence from the digital traces of protest events on the social network Twitter regarding house eviction and three demonstrations of the Indignados in Spain between 2011 and 2013 in order to look into contentious responses to the economic crisis. Exploring social media contents and communication networks provides an opportunity to explore citizen attitudes towards a wide diversity of political action repertoires in the context of issue specific conversations and media accounts. This research compares multiple understandings of the crisis in order to shed some light on how different types of frames adopted by social media users and the media are related to support for demonstrators, grievances and repertoires.