When asked, I shut my blog down, when asked. I signed petitions, when asked, I emailed others and asked them to sign petitions and forward their emails to others. Millions of us did this and because of our efforts Congress has stopped the SOPA and PIPA bill, we have saved our freedom of speech. How incredible that 13 million voices were raised so quickly, what an example of how people CAN USE THEIR VOICES to let our government know that we will not give up our right to communicate freely on the web.
I wonder how many more millions would have raised their voices if, say, twitter and facebook had shut down for a couple of hours!
Kudos to you! My wish would be that we would speak this loudly about our food, that we would stop Monsanto’s GMO, that we would have labels on our food so we know that it is not genetically modified. That we would save the small family farmers. We deserve the right to know what we are eating. Hopefully this will encourage us to lift our strong voices in creating a world where people are living abundant and peaceful lives.
Congratulations to all of us!
Below is the email I received today about this tremendous victory:
A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now — SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today — the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.
The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.
On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.
This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.
The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”
“’This is altogether a new effect,’ Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ‘an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically’ in the last four decades, he added.”
Tweet with us, shout on the internet with us, let’s celebrate: Round of applause to the 13 million people who stood up - #PIPA and #SOPA are tabled 4 now. #13millionapplause
P.S. China’s internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:
In the New Yorker: ”Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know).
…
After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:
‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’”
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(press release is here: https://fightfortheftr.wordpress.com/press-releases/)
