Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Segal, Patrick Ruffini

  Week of October 24, 2011

  October 31-November 7, 2011

  The following week, the first in November, is notable as the only weekly or monthly time slice we observe that looks remotely similar to the prevailing conception of the blogosphere or networked public sphere. It is the only week where Huffington Post, Politico, DailyKos, etc., and traditional media like the LA Times or the Hill, appear prominently. Similarly, Free Press and the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) make a significant appearance. On the other hand, this week also exhibits the possibility that in this network, academic work tackling the issues, rather than simply dueling press releases, can gain visibility. Here, the links to Derek Baumbauer’s paper in SSRN are prominent, driven at least in part by his own cross-posting and linking to them on several platforms like Prawfsblawg. The more “normal” look of this first week provides sharp relief for the remainder of the month, and in particular for the development and emergence of activism, in this case, American Censorship Day. Beginning in the second week in November and continuing from then on, that newly-created site, initiated by the co-founders of Fight for the Future, Participatory Politics Foundation, and Demand Progress with Public Knowledge, the EFF, and support from the Mozilla Foundation, became a major point for coalescence on action, and ultimately the model for the January 18, 2012 protests.

  November 7-14, 2011

  The prominent appearance of the New York Times during this period reflects, however, the continued importance of the major outlets. It reflects widespread linking to Rebecca McKinnon’s opinion piece explaining how SOPA and PIPA would strengthen China’s repressive firewall and import part of its capabilities to the United States.

  In the map of the last week of November, several interesting features emerge. In addition to the obvious continuity, YouTube becomes a prominent platform, although no single video dominates this effect. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) receives much attention when it announces, on November 21, that it has reversed its position and now opposes SOPA. Research papers receive substantial attention; here, Allan Friedman’s analysis of the effects of SOPA on cybersecurity, published on brookings.edu, and survey results of research conducted by Joe Karaganis at the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) suggesting that the practices targeted by SOPA and PIPA are rare, and that public opinion supports a certain level of “copy culture.” Finally, the possibility of individual voices emerging periodically at critical moments is exhibited by the visibility here of Brad Burnham’s tumblr.

  Week of November 21

  A weakness of simple visual examination of the the maps, however, is revealed by the discrepancy between size and location of the node describing Alex Howard at O’Reilly Radar. His posts link to all of these highly-visible sites, and his node is located at the center of the link economy. However, because he acts by identifying and linking out to these nodes, rather than being linked-to, his bridging role does not “pop out” in a simple visual examination of the maps.

  In the first two weeks of December of 2012 some of the action shifts back to D.C.; the National Review conducts dueling editorials as the right wing tries to reconcile between its members who support SOPA and those who oppose it. Sunlight Foundation’s review of contributions to members gets some linking, but the most interesting observation, from the perspective of the role of individuals and the mobilization of expertise, is the prominence of the analysis of the SOPA managers’ amendment developed by law professor Eric Goldman on his blog.

  December 2012, Week 2.

  December 2011, Weeks 4, 3

  On December 21, 2011, the House Judiciary committee released a long list of corporate supporters of SOPA, in the hope of bolstering the claim that SOPA was good for business and innovation. The difference between the map before and after that event is stark, and provides one of the clearest examples we have of (a) the dynamism of the networked public sphere and (b) the possibility of converting discourse into action. It marks a major mobilization by online users, initiated by a single reddit user, to boycott Go Daddy for its support of SOPA/PIPA. Go Daddy retreated and abandoned the acts almost immediately. Following this boycott, we later see gamers follow a similar path in January, with users pressing customer support sites and sharing their queries and answers from vendors on sites like Kotaku, Joystic, mommysbestblog, and epicgames. The bottom half of the map during the fourth week of December is a stark instance of converting talk into action in the networked public sphere, as well as an instance of how a single speaker, with an idea, can move a large group.

  Furthermore, while this map cannot distinguish between reasons for links to Wikipedia, an analysis of the actual links that make up the aggregate reemergence of Wikipedia as a major node in the fourth week of December shows a mix, with a significant portion linking to the debate launched by Jimmy Wales within Wikipedia as to whether SOPA is so dangerous to the open Internet that Wikipedia should shut down in protest for a day. The debate within the Wikipedia community, including over two thousand participants in the decision, was itself a fascinating instance of direct democracy—in this case, within the community of contributors to one of the world’s more visited and important Web sites.

  The overwhelming story of January is the explosion of action and attention around the blackout on January 18, 2012. The single week of January 16–23 saw over three thousand five hundred stories on SOPA and PIPA, about 40% of the total number of stories between the introduction of SOPA and its defeat, and about one third of all stories throughout the 18-month period we studied. In this particular moment of massive mobilization, certain of the long-standing core nodes remain visible: Techdirt, CNET, and Ars Technica; Wikipedia; the EFF; and Open Congress and Fight for the Future. The new major node, which had already emerged during the prior week, Whitehouse. gov, is the administration’s public declaration of its opposition to SOPA/PIPA, a declaration made in direct response to a petition drive that garnered over fifty thousand signatures using the platform of petition.whitehouse.gov. The only other notable feature is the growing role that reddit came to play in the last three weeks of the campaign, following the initial activation around the GoDaddy boycott. By the week of the boycott itself, reddit is located at the very heart of the map.

  The major flip in support in the House and Senate between January 18 and 19 clearly shows that the protest of January 18 closed the deal. But it is impossible to understand that day without also understanding the discourse, framing, and organizing dynamics of the preceding 17 months. This period, as we saw, was comprised of a highly dynamic, decentralized, experimentation-rich public sphere, where different actors played diverse roles in diagnosing the problems with the act, re-framing the public debate from “piracy that costs millions of jobs” to “Internet censorship,” and organizing for action. Clearly, our analysis does not cover all aspects of the organization. We have not studied Twitter; we have not studied back channels we know existed, such as mailing lists. There are individuals, like Marvin Ammori, whom we know from interviews and available published accounts played a major organizational and intellectual role, but do not show up in our data using public-facing communications alone. Despite these limitations, the data do cohere to a remarkable extent with our qualitative understanding of the dynamics.

  January 2012 Weeks 1 and 2

  January 2012 Week 3: detail

  January 2012 Week 3 Overview

  Perhaps the SOPA/PIPA events were unique. Perhaps the high engagement of young, net-savvy individuals is only available for the politics of technology; perhaps copyright alone is sufficiently orthogonal to traditional party lines to traverse the left-right divide; perhaps Go Daddy is too easy a target for low-cost boycotts; perhaps all this will be easy to copy in the next cyber-astroturf campaign.

  Perhaps.

  But perhaps SOPA/PIPA follows William Gibson’s “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Perhaps, just as was the case with free software that preceded widespread adoption of peer production, the geek
s are five years ahead of a curve that everyone else will follow. If so, then SOPA/PIPA provides us with a richly detailed window into a more decentralized democratic future, where citizens can come together to overcome some of the best-funded, best-connected lobbies in Washington D.C. Time will tell.

  REFLECTING ON THE SOPA BLACKOUT: WHY DID IT WORK, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

  DAVID KARPF

  David Karpf is an assistant professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and an active blogger. He researches online activism and is the author of the recent book The Moveon Effect.

  The January 18th SOPA blackout was the single most successful organizing tactic of the Internet era. Over seven million people signed Google’s online petition. Over seventy-five thousand websites took part in the protest. The day of action produced immediate results. Six senators ended their cosponsorships of the bill, while twenty-six more announced their opposition. Opposition to the bill approximately tripled in the House, leading Speaker John Boehner to announce that the bill would be returned to committee and reworked. The SOPA blackout is not the end of the story (legislative proposals are like comic book villains; they never stay dead for long) but the SOPA day of action now stands as the gold standard for Epic Wins in political organizing.

  In the realm of political advocacy, it doesn’t get much better than this. Amidst the high fives and hat tips, I think it is particularly instructive to think through why the tactic proved so successful. This will not be the last time that legacy content industries seek to extract control from the medium. Often in issue politics, winning a victory only buys you time until the next fight. If we take the wrong lessons away from the successful Day of Action, then the next effort may not turn out so well. I would argue that the blackout succeeded on three levels—mediating citizen mobilization, directly driving the news agenda, and direct exposure to Members of Congress.

  First, consider the Day of Action through the normal lens. Most advocacy tactics in American politics revolve around mobilizing citizens to contact their elected representatives. This is basically a souped-up version of the standard action alerts that MoveOn, Demand Progress, Organizing for America, and other advocacy groups send daily to their members. The numbers are quite high, but we should put those in perspective: heavy phone and email traffic is nothing new for Congressional offices. The side that generates heavier constituent outrage doesn’t always win. Constituent outrage is just one of many signals that Congress considers.

  They also consider expert testimony (firmly opposed to the bill, in this case), and the will of wealthy donors/affected industries (often expressed through lobbyists—an excess of Hollywood money and lobbying influence is what got us the terrible bill in the first place). Viewed through this traditional lens, the tactic is a limited success. One should not expect that similarly-sized e-petitions would usually produce such dramatic results.

  The second level was a news event in itself. The average Day of Action is, simply put, not very newsworthy. Advocacy groups churn out press releases, but journalists generally ignore them. That isn’t because of a corporate bias in newsrooms. It’s because advocacy campaigns are an everyday occurrence in the nation’s capital. They usually aren’t particularly newsworthy. The SOPA blackout was different. Wikipedia going dark drew wide coverage. Even if you didn’t happen to visit Wikipedia on January 18th, you may have visited a news site or tuned in to the Colbert Report. This forces politicians who were otherwise ignoring the issue to take a stand. Congress discusses thousands of bills every year. Reporters don’t call and ask for positions on every issue, every day. On the day of the blackout, reporters were calling about SOPA. And Members of Congress treat news coverage itself as an approximation of public opinion—if an issue is in the news, they presume their constituents care about it (Herbst 1998). So part of what made the blackout effective was that it was, itself, a news event.

  Notice, however, that the blackout was treated as news specifically because it was original. This was the “Internet public” speaking out like never before. Wikipedia doesn’t take political stances. Google doesn’t call on web-searchers to contact Congress. The freshness of the tactic is what makes it newsworthy. If Wikipedia did this once a month, it would quickly cease to merit wider media attention. This is a process I call “advocacy inflation” (Karpf 2012). The value of any given tactic is often tied to its novelty—as a rule of thumb, you want to craft tactics that are either larger than your target is used to (if they usually receive one hundred phone calls on every issue, mobilize one thousand phone calls) or different than your target is used to (if they’re used to phone calls, organize twenty people to show up at their town hall meeting instead).

  Advocacy inflation happens for two reasons. First, tactics lose their novelty and, thus, become less newsworthy in their own right. This is particularly important in online organizing. There are plenty of reporters and news outlets that cover technology and society. The first time we use the Internet in a new way for politics, reporters will write stories about the effort itself. By the fifth time, it will be treated as the new normal. The second reason is that advocacy organizations imitate each other. Think of it as a noise-to-signal problem. If an organization finds that a new tactic is successful in attracting Congressional attention, peer organizations will start to emulate. The first emails to Congress were fresh and original, a way to hear from constituents that cut through the pile of form letters submitted every day. Today, emails to Congress often go basically unread. They are even spammier than the form letters. There’s greater marginal value in being the first activists to try a new form of pressure tactic than in catching up with the innovators.

  There’s a third level of influence here as well: direct exposure. Congressional offices are busy places. The nice thing about the blackout is that it cut directly through the clutter. At some point in the day on January 18th, at least one staffer in every office Googled something or looked something up on Wikipedia. Many Members of Congress probably did so themselves, in fact. And when they did, they were confronted with something they’d never seen before on those sites.

  The blackout cut through the din of constituent calls and emails, lobby visits, and policy briefings. The targets of the action saw it themselves, and it grabbed attention in a way that everyday persuasion and influence tactics rarely can.

  Notice that this third level only works because of the major sites involved. The anti-SOPA campaign was not led by Google and Wikipedia, and its success cannot be laid solely at their feet. But, as great as it was that DailyKos and Boing Boing took part in the day of action, the tactic would have been much weaker if those had been the largest sites involved. Those sites draw tech-savvy and/or politics-savvy audiences. Even with the cross-partisan support of conservative sites like RedState, the average American is unlikely to see the content, and the only Congressional staffers who will see it are the ones (usually, interns) charged with monitoring the blogs.

  Let’s be clear about this third level of influence, then. It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment. But that’s a pretty meek revolution. Google is still a corporation, “Don’t Be Evil” motto notwithstanding (Vaidhyanathan 2011). If the digital companies start expending more resources pressuring Congress, that will provide a more pluralistic balance in the MPAA’s policy playground, but it doesn’t necessarily put power in the hands of the “Internet public.”

  The fight over Internet censorship is far from over. What do these three levels of influence mean for the future of Internet politics? The way I see it, there are three potential outcomes:

  1. It’s entirely possible that Hollywood will just work harder next time, bulldozing past the coalition that organized the blackout. The MPAA was taken by surprise this time. You can’t count on that happening twice. The result would likely be a slightly-
less-awful Internet Piracy bill, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to ruin the Internet we know and love. Legislative victories can be fickle things, and advocacy inflation means that the next blackout may be met with a resigned shrug by many newsrooms. At the second level of influence, the next SOPA will be tougher to beat than the last one was.

  2. It’s possible that major tech firms will get a seat at the table in the next round of negotiations. It is possible to craft an Internet piracy bill that serves the interests of Google and the interests of Hollywood without serving the interests of smaller content creation sites. We would do well to recall the Net Neutrality compromise that Google made in the summer of 2010. Sometimes “Don’t Be Evil” is just a motto. The problem here is that, without Google, the third level of influence is much reduced. Google occupies a unique space in the geography of the Internet.

  3. Most hopefully, it is possible that the SOPA blackout will allow a new public—what David Parry calls “the Internet Public” (Parry 2011) to take root. Social movements are built from the grist of shared campaign efforts like this one. You can use these moments to build movements, crafting new institutions that pressure government and educate the citizenry about the values of and threats to an open network. Movement-building is hard, slow work. But it has the benefit of yielding increasing returns at the first level of influence. As your movement grows, you build a capacity to mobilize constituent pressure. Your movement becomes newsworthy in its own right, either attracting existing media or creating its own.