3 ms·
I was one of guys behind sopablackout.org, one of the larger players in the sopa movement a while back. I think that the main difference between the effects of
by jjcm 13y ago
I was one of guys behind sopablackout.org, one of the larger players in the sopa movement a while back. I think that the main difference between the effects of this protest and the sopa protests, is that for sopa, sites quite literally blacked out their pages for the day. You couldn't ignore the message. This time, the popup/message was less in your face. On HN it was a small piece of text at the top of the page. I didn't even see it on reddit.
Yes a lot of call volume was made, but I think the general public didn't really know it was happening. With SOPA, sites went black. Content became unavailable. Users didn't get what they wanted, so they tried to figure out why.
70,000 calls are great, but the that makes up a minuscule portion of the elected officials' demographics.
I think the largest problem here was that the campaign's objective was contacting representatives, whereas the SOPA's objective was educating the public. One lasts a day, the other is sustainable.
- this_user 13y agoI think one big difference is that the SOPA campaign had a very clear-cut goal of stopping that legislation while this campaign is "against mass surveillance" which is much more nebulous. Most people on the Internet seem to agree that they are against mass surveillance, but there is a lack of clear goals and demands that everyone can get behind.
- Ensorceled 13y agoWorse, they all have different levels of acceptable surveillance. Many Americans think that the current spying is ok, many more think spying on all non-Americans is ok, many other Americans thing ANY spying is bad. The vast majority of Americans could recognize that SOPA was just plain bad: bad for business, bad for users, bad for everybody.