FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT
Tiffiniy Cheng, Holmes Wilson
press@fightforthefuture.org
Phone: (508) 474-5248
The internet is currently engaged in the largest ever online protest in opposition to internet censorship legislation moving in Congress, PIPA and SOPA.
Three top-ten sites in the U.S. -- Google.com, Craigslist.org, and en.wikipedia.org -- have blacked out all or part of their sites in protest of the bill.
As of 10 a.m. ET, eleven top 100 U.S. sites are participating in the strike (site rankings are from Alexa.com). Wordpress alone powers 16 percent of the top 1 million sites globally, and all of those sites are being blacked out.
More than 62,000 sites have signed up to join at sopastrike.com. The exact number of sites that are participating is unknown at this point, but we believe 10,000 to be a conservative estimate.
The protest is in response to legislation (S.968) scheduled for a vote in the Senate on Jan. 24th that would give the government and corporations new powers to block access to entire websites because of a single link in violation of copyright law. The website takedowns would effectively censor hosts of legal, constitutionally-protected speech, and the bill is considered to be in violation of the First Amendment by several prominent constitutional scholars.
Ultimately, the fight against these bills is about more than web censorship. It is a fundamental struggle about who has power in modern society -- the people with the means to communicate freely or the governments and corporations that want to lock down control. Today's action, and the corresponding drop-off in congressional support for these bills, is a raw display of power for the people at large.
About Fight for the Future
Fight for the Future is a new non-profit organization that works to defend online rights and personal freedoms. Fight for the Future organized American Censorship Day on November 16, 2011, the largest online protest in the past 5 years, with more than 4 million people contacting Congress and companies like Tumblr and Mozilla taking unprecedented steps to drive users to contact Congress.
fightforthefuture.org
americancensorship.org
sopastrike.com
1 comment:
For future reference, alexa is a horrible metric for ranking. They have been past their prime some four years now. The primary source of ranking information is collected from user installed tool bars and heuristic solutions based off of other search engine rankings. The average Joe doesn't install the alexa toolbar; alexa has a bias towards showing the results of the technologically inclined people.
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