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I think David Segal's comment, which were added later to the article, sum things up pretty perfectly: “To mark all organizing a success or failure by measuring

by sinak 13y ago

I think David Segal's comment, which were added later to the article, sum things up pretty perfectly: “To mark all organizing a success or failure by measuring it against the single biggest online activist moment ever is ridiculous.” But this was also just a case of really lazy journalism. Nicole Perlroth failed to contact any of the organizations or companies involved before publishing her article, and it contained a number of factual inaccuracies, only some of which have now been corrected: - "Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages." None of them were "listed as organizers." Their logos appeared on their site, but supporting/participating != organizing. This would have been easily corrected if she'd asked. DuckDuckGo changed their homepage logo yesterday, and Mozilla added a link and logo on the browser start page, which is visible every time someone opens a new window. - "[List of large tech co's] only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner." Facebook, Google and Twitter also released statements in support, and tweeted/shared on social media. - "Most of those [calls and emails] were directed to Senator Dianne Feinstein." I have no idea where she got this from. Feinstein did receive 2420 calls, but saying she received "most" of them is just nonsense. - "But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize." Over 4,000 comments were posted to the reddit blog post that announced their participation and contained the banner. At least another 3,000 comments were made on other threads. You can also see a diff of changes made to the post later in the day here: https://github.com/sinak/sinak.github.com/commit/d8050c456337beb73301844904acd95225eec031 https://github.com/sinak/sinak.github.com/commit/d8050c45633...

sinak 13y ago
We drove 80k calls and 500k+ emails to Congress without a specific vote pending. Even without any of the larger tech companies participating we generated about as fifth as many calls as SOPA (400k). We also lacked a call to action as defeating a pending bill that would jeopardize internet freedom. Why didn't larger tech companies didn't take part? I think that's an interesting question worth a journalist investigating. As with SOPA, companies like Google left their decision until the last minute. But this time around they decided to support the protest, but not take part by adding content to their home pages. I'm not sure any one thing explains it. Larger tech has added a significant lobbying apparatus since 2011 and perhaps that's part of it. They're playing the inside political game much more so than they did a couple of years ago. If it turns out to be more effective that online activism, I'm not sure we can particularly criticize them for it. They've also banded together on this issue under the "reformgovernmentsurveillance.com" banner. That makes participation a more complicated group decision-making process. While we branded yesterday as "the day" (which I know some of you take issue with), this is by no means the end. It's one in a series of actions. The actual votes on bills like the USA Freedom Act and FISA Improvements Act are yet to come. We made a dent, but this is a process.

by sinak 13y ago

sinak 13y ago

We drove 80k calls and 500k+ emails to Congress without a specific vote pending. Even without any of the larger tech companies participating we generated about as fifth as many calls as SOPA (400k). We also lacked a call to action as defeating a pending bill that would jeopardize internet freedom. Why didn't larger tech companies didn't take part? I think that's an interesting question worth a journalist investigating. As with SOPA, companies like Google left their decision until the last minute. But this time around they decided to support the protest, but not take part by adding content to their home pages. I'm not sure any one thing explains it. Larger tech has added a significant lobbying apparatus since 2011 and perhaps that's part of it. They're playing the inside political game much more so than they did a couple of years ago. If it turns out to be more effective that online activism, I'm not sure we can particularly criticize them for it. They've also banded together on this issue under the "reformgovernmentsurveillance.com" banner. That makes participation a more complicated group decision-making process. While we branded yesterday as "the day" (which I know some of you take issue with), this is by no means the end. It's one in a series of actions. The actual votes on bills like the USA Freedom Act and FISA Improvements Act are yet to come. We made a dent, but this is a process.