
The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers - sinak
https://thedaywefightback.org/the-results/
======
suprgeek
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.

~~~
hammerzeit
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
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.

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ChrisAntaki
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.

~~~
dmix
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/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/)

~~~
Shivetya
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.

~~~
tripzilch
Your conclusion doesn't logically follow, given what the GP said: "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", clearly suggests a conspiracy to get to this particular
person _regardless_ of whether they brought their own rope.

You're basically saying "I don't care, he went to a prostitute of his own free
will", which is no rational reason to discount the theory that they targeted
him specifically, because if he hadn't done so, they'd have either found
something else, or made something happen. The fact that they didn't _have_ to,
doesn't suggest they did not target him, while the fact that they also didn't
out any of the tons of other people, suggests that there might be a reason for
this particular person other than mere chance.

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

[http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/](http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/)

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
_" 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.)

------
rdl
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!

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rblatz
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.

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algorias
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.

~~~
tripzilch
Sign the thing at
[https://necessaryandproportionate.net/](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.

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

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

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slg
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?

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winslow
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.

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seizethecheese
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
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
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.

~~~
bzbarsky
As far as I can tell, Obama has been basically ignoring the economy as much as
he can get away with. Especially the parts of it he directly controls, like
who's on the Fed's Board of Governors (where it took him a year to get around
to even nominating anyone for the two positions that were empty at the start
of his first term). As a result, during the most critical part of the
recession the FOMC was made up of 5 regional bank presidents and 5 appointed
governors, instead of the 7 appointed governors it should have had, and
therefore Fed policy was much more strongly biased towards the bank presidents
than it should have been.

The rest of your analysis is about right, though.

> No other party matters

And both of the incumbent parties write legislation to make sure it stays that
way...

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dpweb
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.

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

89k is actually a very large number.

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__david__
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?

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k0
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)).

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

~~~
bendoernberg
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&...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&view=4&flow=list&live_view=500)

~~~
codex
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.

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tool
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.

~~~
bendoernberg
Very apt username you have there

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throwaway5eyes
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
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.

