Yesterday’s anti SOPA / PIPA protests were quite effective. Thousands of sites went “dark” and thousands more issued statements or offered some kind of graphic in protest to SOPA / PIPA. As a result many major supporters, including some of the authors, have withdrawn their support. Though the bills were not killed, they were significantly damaged. Below are some interesting statistics about the impact of yesterday’s protests.
- 7 million people signed Google’s petition to stop the legislation
- Google’s petition was +1’d 130,000 times
- Google’s Facebook post about SOPA / PIPA received over 4,600 likes, and 1,100+ shares
- 3.9 million tweets went out about SOPA / PIPA
- 162 million users saw Wikipedia’s blackout page
- 8 million people used Wiki’s blackout page to look up their representative’s contact info
- 12,000 people commented on the Wikipedia Foundation page
- 323,000 Flickr pictures were darkened during the protest
- Reddit blacked out their site meaning their users didn’t spend 18 million minutes viewing their content
- WordPress’ protest was seen by about 35 million bloggers
- Craigslist went dark and as a result probably lost about $825,000 in revenue
As a result of all of this activity, the bill now has 35 opposing senators, which is up from only 5 opponents last week.
Awesome.
