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SOPA Blackout and Withdrawal

Many millions of people were in some way participants in Wednesday's Web blackout in opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I received a note from Matt Kolasinski suggesting "The Stop SOPA project (SOPA- an overreaching piece of legislation aimed at online piracy) attracted global attention and widespread participation. it's pretty big. I'd expect to see some sort of response in the eggs. An opportunity to notice any difference in some way of the character of the event as registered by the eggs.

Indeed it was a big event numerically, though difficult to specify temporally. I asked Matt for a time period, and he responded with, "The central event time would be Jan 20, 2012 10:32 AM, or very close to that, when Associated Press came out with the announcement that the bill had been withdrawn." The GCP methodology requires a period of some hours during which a deviation will be predicted, but this provided a framework.

PC magazine's Jan 20 report provides some background:

In stats released last night, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, said it reached 40 million people during Wednesday's blackout, who in turn sent 360,000 emails to their members of Congress about SOPA and PIPA.

Mozilla has been taking action against the bills since Nov. 15, when it emblazoned its site logos with a black "Stop Censorship" banner. But during the protest, Mozilla blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected key Mozilla Web sites to an action page.

As a result, about 30 million people in the U.S. who use the default page in Firefox saw the blackout message, Mozilla said in a blog post. About 1.8 million people came directly to the mozilla.org/sopa site to learn more. The organization also sent messages to nearly 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter, and its Firefox newsletter and its messages were retweeted by more than 20,000 people.

Mozilla joined online protests from Internet bigwigs like Wikipedia, which blocked its English site all day, and Google, which replaced its main search page logo with a black bar directing users to an online petition that garnered at least 7 million signatures.

All that activity appears to have had the desired result. Senate and House leaders today announced that they would delay action on the controversial bills. A vote scheduled for next Tuesday in the Senate has been postponed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and in the House, SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith said the Judiciary Committee would also postpone action on his bill.

The GCP event was set for a 6 hour period beginning at 10:00 PST, (18:00-24:00 UTC). The result is Chisquare 21351.025 on 21600 df, for p = 0.885 and Z = -1.199.

SOPA Blackout and
Withdrawal

Since the blackout was going on for a much longer period, it is interesting to look at the full 24 hours of the 20th, most of which precedes the GCP event period. The result looks a bit more exciting, but even as an informal look, it is not statistically persuasive.

SOPA Blackout and
Withdrawal

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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