BitShareBitShare is back up, after our 24hr #SOPAstrike
When I first went on SOPA Strike it was just after midnight on Wednesday, with the intention on striking with my custom message up to stop SOPA for 24 hours. I ended up keeping the message up all last night as well, so all in all, it was well over 24 hours of striking the horrible SOPA and PIPA bills. I am happy I did too.
It appears the turn out here on my blog and all across the Internet was huge. From Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Wordpress, Mozilla, Tumblr and many more websites protesting in different ways, I think we got our point across to Congress. Kudos to everyone who protested, who may still be protesting, in our mission to keep the Internet censorship free!
The protest generated a lot of traffic, specifically to Senators social profiles and their own websites, where citizens were trying to contact them to make their voices heard. One report shows Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) website crashing from all the traffic. Thanks to Google, they were able to get 4.5 million people to sign their petition and according to Twitter, yesterday afternoon there were 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets.
Twitter was basically a hot bed of SOPA action. Since I shut down my blog for the day, I wanted to be active socially to help spread the word. Twitter basically was the most active site for SOPA protests, with one tweet of mine in particular getting hundreds and hundreds of retweets. Twitter shows a max of 100+, but I know from my mentions in Twitter it has been literally hundreds of retweets, as shown below which even Klout said I was one of the Top 5 Influential SOPA Voices yesterday!
Google Plus had a good stream of content also, but wasn’t nearly as active as Twitter was. Facebook users didn’t seem to care, or are ignorant of the situation. I understand the ignorance, but once provided information about SOPA all over the web yesterday, it just shows that on Facebook it’s about self-righteousness and people only seem to care about their own personal issues, and not the greater good for others, even when it affects them. It’s sad, but it’s the truth.
The protest made a big difference in the eyes of Congress though. Both the SOPA and PIPA co-sponsors of the bills abandoned their support and in total, there are now 35 senators publicly opposing these bills. This is way up from prior to the protest when only 5 senators were opposed to them. I would say in total, yesterday was a victory. The unfortunate thing is the battle was won, but the war is not over yet. The entertainment industry will more than likely continue with their efforts to push these bills, with slight changes here and there to try to get them pushed through, or even create other bills to try to get them through. I will try to keep a steady eye on everything, and you can continue to follow the SOPA and PIPA news updates here.
And if you missed it yesterday, here is a screen shot of how our messaging looked. Also a big shout out to Grass Routes who provided the awesome widget which let you contact your Congress Rep’s with one click on Facebook, Twitter, Phone and Email right from our blog.
