The Day We Fight Back, billed as the biggest online protest since 2012, is already putting up numbers that could back up the hype.
Supporters have placed more than 60,000 calls to members Congress to protest mass surveillance and advocate the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program.
They’ve also sent more than 125,000 emails.
The Day We Fight Back invites and obvious comparison to the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012. Hundreds of thousands of Internet users, along with major companies including Google, Reddit, and Wikipedia, banded together to defeat the bill.
Although Google hasn’t blacked out its site to protest the NSA, it has issued a statement in favor of the USA Freedom Act.
According to Fight for the Future, 115,000 websites joined the SOPA protests, and the campaign resulted in more than 8 million calls and 4 million emails. As of Tuesday morning, more than 6,000 had joined The Day We Fight Back, along with protesters on the ground in 15 countries.
The numbers may not come close to those of the SOPA protest, but that’s not how the Day We Fight Back is measuring success. The point, at least in the short term, is to convince Congress to pass the Freedom Act.
The bill picked up one additional sponsor Tuesday, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.).
Photo by Elvert Barnes/Flickr | Remix by Jason Reed (CC BY-SA 2.0)