SOPA Protest On Twitter Generates 2.4 Million Tweets

By James Ashworth

TWITTER has announced that on Wednesday, the day of the SOPA protest, more than 2.4 million tweets were made between midnight and 4pm concerning SOPA and its sister bill PIPA. The top five keywords posted about the protest were ‘SOPA’, ‘Stop SOPA’, ‘PIPA’, ‘Tell Congress’ and ‘#factswithoutwikipedia’. 

Although this may not be the greatest number of tweets made on a subject, with the MTV Music Awards producing 8,868 tweets per second for example, this is still a massive number of tweets, and shows how many people are opposed to the SOPA and PIPA bills even those who are not related to organisations that will be affected by the legislations.

But Twitter users are not the only ones against the bills, as shown by online encyclopedia Wikipedia and social news website Reddit, who both blacked out for a full 24 hours on Wednesday in protest. Other websites like Facebook and Twitter did not go as far as to shut down their sites, but displayed their disapproval of SOPA and PIPA, and presented themselves as platforms for users to post opposing messages as to why the bills should not get through American government.

And now it seems that all the protests might have paid off, as the amount of American Congress members opposed to SOPA has increased to almost four times the amount as before the protests of Wednesday. So, it seems that although there may not have been the largest number of tweets, the 2.4 million that were posted, combined with other protests on sites like Facebook, and the blacking out of Wikipedia and Reddit, may have defeated their opponent, and championed the right to have a free and open Internet

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