Anti-SOPA protests in numbers: ‘the largest online protest in history’
The January 18 protests against the US’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PIPA bills are being called the largest online protest in history.
Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Flickr, WordPress, Tumblr, Vimeo, Reddit and hundreds of other websites around the globe blacked out their homepages or added anti-SOPA banners and messages to their website to show how the bills, if passed, could change the web for the worse.
According to Fight for the Future’s non-profit project Sopastrike.com more than 115,000 sites participated in the strike.
The White House said 103,785 people signed petitions through its We the People platform.
Around the web the silent and peaceful protests successfully encouraged millions of netizens to sign various petitions against the two proposed bills. According to Google more than 7 million people signed petitions and over 887,000 called the US Congress to voice their concerns with the bills.
“Thank you to the more than 7 million of you in the U.S. that took the time yesterday to petition Congress to stop #SOPA and #PIPA, two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses,” said Google.
Twitter announced via a tweet that it had seen “2.4+ million SOPA-related Tweets from 12am-4pm ET today. Top 5 terms: SOPA, Stop SOPA, PIPA, Tell Congress, #factswithoutwikipedia.”
Wikipedia said that more than 162 million people saw its “imagine a world without free knowledge” message but cautioned that “SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you've directed your energy to protecting it.”
If you missed out on all the action, app tracking firm Pingdom has collected screenshots of some of the best and most creative anti-SOPA messages from around the web. The collection can be viewed at http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/18/cool-and-creative-anti-sopa-blackout-messages-internet-protest-in-action/
Kickstarter data engineer Fred Benenson created a nice visualization of the #SOPA tweets which can be viewed on his blog, http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2012/01/18/twitter-conversations-about-sopa/.
