http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/02/why-big-tech-didnt-fight-day-we-fight-back
Remember the SOPA blackout? The 2012 protest against the expansion of online copyright enforcement was pretty hard to ignore, with Google and other major sites blacking out their homepage logos or going offline entirely.
Yesterday's "The Day We Fight Back" protest against NSA surveillance was supposed to have been similarly huge, but unless you follow this sort of thing closely, you might have missed it. It was covered lightly in the press, and only briefly trended on Twitter. Given how much Edward Snowden's revelations have supposedly insulted the sensibilities and threatened the profits of Silicon Valley, the "we" in "The Day We Fight Back" has proved surprisingly small.
This is not to say the NSA protest didn't get any attention: It generated 350,000 Facebook shares, some 75,000 phone calls and 150,000 emails to Congress, and 215,000 signatures on an online petition. Yet that can't touch the impact of the protest against Stop Online Piracy Act—the largest protest in the short history of the internet. The SOPA campaign took off because "people find it much easier to rally around a specific 'ask'" such as killing SOPA, says Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped organize yesterday's protest—"a much broader ask and a much more nuanced ask."
Yet the anti-NSA action might have gone viral had major tech companies put their weight behind it. While the Reform Government Surveillance Coalition (which includes Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft) endorsed the protest, and Google and Twitter issued supportive statements, you wouldn't have known it from their homepages.
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