The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers

https://thedaywefightback.org/the-results/

by sinak • 12 years ago

155 46 12 years ago

sinak2• 12 years ago

I wrote my thoughts on the New York Times's "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" article here:

tl;dr The NYT post was inaccurate in lots of ways. It's true that Tuesday was much smaller than SOPA. But judging campaign success by the most important online activist moment in history sets an almost impossibly high bar. Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to. American Censorship Day happened 2 months before and was much smaller.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

"Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to."

That's one of the biggest points missed by the NYT piece, in my opinion. To play devil's advocate, I do think it raised a good point: namely, that this particular fight is more abstract in the public eye. But in the set of all possible points to be made about TDWFB, that was a relatively minor one.

SOPA and PIPA had much higher general awareness before the blackouts, and the blackouts were built up to for weeks on end. (Maybe even months, judging from a quick look back at my own HN history from the time.)

seizethecheese• 12 years ago

Raw numbers are meaningless to people. Do I really have a good sense of the difference between 25 million views and 50 million?

Why not show us what percentage of internet users saw a banner that day? What percentage of those seeing a banner called their congressman?

rkuykendall-com• 12 years ago

The problem is that only a certain of percentage of Americans can legally vote, only a percentage of those (50%-60%) will actually vote, and a much smaller percentage of those will ever vote outside their party line (swing voters).

So the percentage of Americans is small, but the impact may be much larger. Or it might be much smaller. Who knows.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

Aside: I would vote outside of party lines. However, I am forced to choose a very slightly smaller evil at every turn. Democrats gave me a president that started doing smart things for the economy and rights of minorities, yet brought about drone strikes, codified the Wild West that arose from the Bush era and allowed the NSA to blossom further.

The Republicans gave me a non functioning Congress and a presidential candidate unable to pull his head out of his ass.

No other party matters unless you live in a specific district where an old time independent is an incumbent.

saraid216• 12 years ago

Don't forget the percentage that were American.

oceanstone• 12 years ago

Keep in mind, for many people, the scariest thing about this whole mass surveillance issue is the potential to blackmail elected officials. It takes courage for them to stand up to something like the NSA. We need to show our reps we have their backs. 89,000 calls is pretty impressive.

winslow3• 12 years ago

Keep in mind it's scary for the individual to call as well for fear of being put on a list. So 89,000 is definitely impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if I was put on a list yesterday after saying something along the lines of "the government's actions are turning people against the government and creating enemies of their own citizens". Oh well I don't care about being on a list anymore. It's time to stand up.

comex2• 12 years ago

Do you have any evidence that anyone would be tracked or targeted for such a thing, or is this just wild speculation?

dmix• 12 years ago

Anyone who doesn't believe this needs to watch Client 9 [1] about Eliot Spitzer.

It's very convincing that someone powerful targetted him for his anti-wallstreet policies and sought to catch him with a high paid prostitute. The weird part starts happening when they interview the madam and brothel hustlers who she hired, and find out tons of famous politicians and Wall st execs uses them... but noone else got brought down despite all the private investigations, wiretaps, and FBI investigations, except the one guy pissing off people in power.

Now in 2014 we're back down to nearly zero reputable prominent people in office calling out Wall st or political corruption. Except maybe the crazy fringe types like Rand Paul.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/

nrao123• 12 years ago

It is not only the fringe. It's almost a rite of passage for ambitious prosecutors/attorney generals to take on Wall Street and/or corruption. Guiliani, Spitzer & now Bharara (he took the lead on Galleon, SAC, etc)

logicchains• 12 years ago

It's hardly productive to call crazy one of the very few senators who has consistently and without compromise opposed the kind of things the fightback in question was referring to. It's no wonder America's in the state it is, when someone is called crazy for opposing war, but the presidents who readily kill children and innocents by proxy (drones) are seen as perfectly sane.

f_salmon• 12 years ago

That movie was a real eye opener.

M: 10/10

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Lets be honest here, Spitzer was using prostitutes of his own free will. Just someone either put some effort into catching him or got lucky while he was getting lucky. So I am not going to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon when the party in question is supplying the gun.

algorias• 12 years ago

Seeing the numbers like that does make me realize what a huge deal this was. I hope this will be the start of a movement truly bringing positive change.

I wish there was something meaningful for me to do, as a non-american, to help this campaign. It's only sane to assume that surveillance efforts similar to those of the US exist in most other countries, but it's hard to act when no concrete information is available.

tripzilch2• 12 years ago

Sign the thing at https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ and check out which of the international sponsoring organisations are near you, visit their websites and see how you can help and/or donate.

For instance, for me that is Bits of Freedom in NL. They do good things and provide tangible local things to do, help with, or raise awareness about.

winslow3• 12 years ago

I think this was very important for them to publish. With the articles yesterday coining the term "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" and even personally feeling like we failed a bit after seeing the initial numbers. This changes my perception that we had a bigger impact than I initially thought. Definitely a strong step forward.

ufo• 12 years ago

The website looks depressing if you have Javascript disabled: 0 people saw the banner; 0 emails sent; 0 signatures ...

sammularczyk• 12 years ago

My bad. Should've picked that up, all fixed now

crystaln• 12 years ago

Fortunately anyone with Javascript disabled needs no convincing.

slg• 12 years ago

Does anyone know if any politicians have publicly stated a change of opinion after the protest? In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protest, there were a lot of politicians who came out against those bills who were either supporting it or neutral before the protests. Isn't that, not something like raw number of tweets, the true watermark for success or failure?

throwaway5eyes• 12 years ago

Nothing will change. This campaign was a complete waste of everyones time.

You would be better off spending the money on developing new encryption solutions, antiforensic tools, anonymity networks and legal defenses for those caught in their snares. The five eyes will never stop their global surveillance of planet Earth. Learn to work around it, not complaining to government to make things change. Technology never regresses. You poor bastards ain't seen nothing yet.

GhotiFish• 12 years ago

Lots of technology is ready to go, people just arn't using it. So it's more a fight for a will than for a way.

dpweb• 12 years ago

Could you devote 100% of the effort focused on only one goal - pressuring Google or Facebook to put up the banner. Then, in 1 day, a billion people see the banner. The email, phone support is then invariably much higher.

suprgeek• 12 years ago

The NY times article got a very basic point wrong.

Q: How do you judge the success of the campaign to raise awareness by calling congress people?

A: By the number of calls/contacts made. Instead they compared it to the SOPA protest that "stopped" the bills and hence declared it a failure.

The goal of raising awareness was most certainly achieved (because the frikkin NYT wrote a whole article about it) This is just the first salvo in a long war - no need to declare victors & losers already.

blottsie• 12 years ago

The reason the NYTimes author (and others) compared 'The Day We Fight Back" to the SOPA protests is likely because 'The Day We Fight Back' used the success against SOPA as its primary example of what online protests can do. The campaign set SOPA as the benchmark, not The New York Times. Its website, before the current updated version, repeatedly evoked the defeat of SOPA as the measuring stick. It did so in the text on the site and the promotional video.

Even the name "The Day We Fight Back" implies that this is a fight that can be won in a day. Supporters later pointed out that this is a long war, not a fight for a day. But the initial promotion of this campaign did little to encourage people to take this fight and make it part of their lives for the foreseeable future. And the fact that supporters are justifying the legitimacy and effectiveness of this campaign by citing one-day numbers only furthers the notion that a single day can make a difference in what will inevitably be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.

sinak2• 12 years ago

Setting a specific date for the action was wrong. In reality it was critical to getting any participation at all. If we'd have themed this as "Fight Back For The Foreseeable Future," I assure you we'd have gotten very little participation. Any large movement is made up of a series of smaller actions.

For example, in the buildup to SOPA we had Internet Censorship Day in November, the Godaddy boycott in December, and then the blackout in January. To see this on a larger scale, simply skim the timeline of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Egyptian_r...

hammerzeit• 12 years ago

The reason so many campaigns use "raising awareness" as a goal is because it is trivially, almost tautologically achievable. Let's say the numbers were 10% of what they are. Hey, raised awareness, success! Let's say they were 10x what they are. Hey, awareness!

Furthermore, to be more brutal about this, I think "getting an article in the NYT" can no longer be a success outcome for awareness in a world with such fast attention cycles. There's an adage in politics that an issue has to be in the press for something like 5 consecutive days for it to have real electoral impact. Seems like that is more akin to the target here.

Yes, it means we can't automatically declare victory, but it also defines a victory that's earned.

VBprogrammer• 12 years ago

I'd be willing to bet that the article was written on the 11th or even before that. The campaign started with a nearly impossible goal, unless Obama himself had come out to declare surrender, they were always going to be able to print that.

__david__• 12 years ago

So, as a person who decided to put the banner up on a couple of the sites that I run/co-run, I'm curious if I actually made an impact, and which sites have more politically actionable users.

Did you collect analytics about calls and which domains they came from? I would be curious to see what sites generated the most calls/emails or the best call/email ratio or the best action/view ratio. Is that possible, or would that be too… privacy violate-y?

codex2• 12 years ago

In other words, this campaign had the viewership of about one moderately popular YouTube video.

bendoernberg2• 12 years ago

You think a video with 37,000,000 views is moderately popular? Looks like the most popular YouTube videos of the past 2 days all have under 6m views, so you're not even remotely accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&...

codex2• 12 years ago

A banner impression is not the same thing as watching a video; not at all. A banner impression has very little value. It's more accurate to look at page views.

stevewilhelm• 12 years ago

A banner impression is a vanity metric.

rdl• 12 years ago

I had kind of low expectations for this (because it's creating artificial time pressure on a long-term issue, which is necessary, but very difficult), and was amazed by how well it went. Congratulations.

It was kind of awesome calling a rep and being told "oh, she is an original co-sponsor of the legislation you're calling about...".

It's pretty clear this is going to be a sustained battle through the press, in the courts, through the legislature (especially in 2014 and 2016 elections), and in technology development. Thanks for this step!

tool• 12 years ago

Every time I see anything related to this bullshit campaign it ruins my entire day. Such a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

People with no understanding of internet and/or privacy, pretending to care about privacy.

bendoernberg2• 12 years ago

Very apt username you have there

k0• 12 years ago

Truth, I must be an ostrich...I had not heard of this campaign nor was it on my radar or in my inbox. SOPA was something I heard about, was on my radar, and was in my inbox. I fail at knowing what the NYT thinks I should know (but I was all about Stop SOPA (but please use soap)).

rblatz• 12 years ago

America has a population of 317+ million. Somewhere between .33% to .66% of America's population even bothered to click through to the day we fight back site. And we all know that is generous, a large portion of those visits were most likely from people outside of the US. Even if they were all from citizens of the US it's still a super tiny minority of people who even were aware of this. I wish it was better, but frankly it was the day that we didn't care.

dbroockman• 12 years ago

We know from randomized trials on legislators that calls do work in changing their positions. http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/berganco...

89k is actually a very large number.

The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers

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