Censorship is a Big Hit on Tumblr: SOPA Day Explodes On Tumblogs

Foster Kamer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:13:24 -0400

Today, if you haven't heard, is American Censorship Day: wherein several websites, large tech companies, and boldfaced names in the technology community lent their help to get the word out about the Stop Online Piracy Act going through Congress, which would manifest itself in very frightening, Orwellian controls of the Internet, which would land squarely in the hands of our government, an entity far from capable of doing everything remotely correct, let alone one even marginally free from the threat of systemic power abuse and corruption.

So! Today, Tumblr was the social network who threw their support behind this thing the most. When you first logged on to the site today, everything on your feed appeared with censorship bars over it, like so:

The redirect sent you to a page informing you about SOPA and what you can do (like dial up a Congressional representative) about making sure this thing goes absolutely nowhere.

This afternoon, Adam Laiacano—a Data Engineer at Tumblr—posted a graph to his blog showing the frequency of posts today with the words 'SOPA' or 'censorship' in them. Take a look:

Laiacano notes:

The above plot displays the increase in posts on Tumblr mentioning ‘SOPA’ or ‘censorship’ from the beginning of today up to just a few minutes ago. We launched the announcement just after 11:00 EST and were quickly producing 3.6 calls per second to representatives around the country.

Not bad. So, Drake: What have you done for poltical activism, privacy, and digital rights today, huh? Also, Twitter, Facebook, and Google?*

[*Oh, wait, at least two of those businesses are predicated on the interruption and/or invasion of privacy so they probably won't care about something like this? No, they won't.]

Betabeat » Censorship is a Big Hit on Tumblr: SOPA Day Explodes On Tumblogs

Censorship is a Big Hit on Tumblr: SOPA Day Explodes On Tumblogs