January 18th: The Day the Internet Fought Back

January 18, 2012

January 18th was declared Blackout Day first by the fine folks on reddit. Reddit, as of late, has been the political activists of the Internet. They raised $15,000 in 48 hours for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) challenger in the upcoming 2012 election, Rob Zerban. Why? Because Paul Ryan supported SOPA. Six days after the monetary figures were released, Paul Ryan retracted his support of SOPA.

On January 10th, Reddit announced the Blackout Day. The subreddit /r/sopa was huge in organizing this as without a community like this, the blackout may not have happened at all. Of course, people were joking about the idea that people would go into withdrawals when reddit shut down for 12 hours but hey, it happens.

We’re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you. Many of you stand with us against PIPA/SOPA, but we know support for a blackout isn’t unanimous. We’re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.

Then there was pressure on bigger websites to join the blackout; Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter–all were petitioned to join in. And thankfully, some of them did.