Examples of early activism
One issue that has to construct with the history of online activism is the one of Lotus MarketPlace. On April 10, 1990, Lotus announced a direct-mail marketing database product that was to contain name, address, and spending habit information on 120 million individual U.S. citizens. While much of the same data was already available, privacy advocates worried about the availability of this data within one database. Furthermore, the data would be on CD-ROM, and so would come on fixed until a new CD-ROM was issued.
In response, a mass e-mail and E-bulletin-board campaign was started, which noted information on contacting Lotus and form letters. Larry Seiler, a New England-based computer professional, posted a message that was widely reposted on newsgroups and via e-mail: "It will contain a LOT of personal information approximately YOU, which anyone in the country can access by just buying the discs. It seems to me and to a lot of other people, too that this will be a little too much like big brother, and it seems like a return notion to receive out while there is still time." Over 30,000 people contacted Lotus and so-called for their names to be removed from the database. On January 23, 1991, Lotus announced that it had cancelled MarketPlace.
In 1993, a survey article about online activism around the world, from Croatia to the United States, appeared in The Nation magazine, with several activists being quoted about their projects and views.
The earliest example of mass emailing as a rudimentary hit of DDoS occurred on Guy Fawkes Day 1994, when the Intervasion of the UK began email-bombing John Major's cabinet and UK parliamentary servers in demostrate against the Criminal Justice Bill, which outlawed outdoor rave festivals and "music with a repetitive beat"
In 1995–1998, Z magazine presented courses online through Left Online University, with lessons on "Using the Internet for Electronic Activism".
The practice of cyber-dissidence and activism per se, that is, in its modern-day form, may have been inaugurated by Dr. Daniel Mengara, a Gabonese scholar and activist alive in political exile in New Jersey in the United States. In 1998, he created a Website in French whose name Bongo Doit Partir Bongo Must Go was clearly indicative of its purpose: it encouraged a revolution against the then 29-year-old regime of Omar Bongo in Gabon. The original URL, http://www.globalwebco.net/bdp/, began to redirect to http://www.bdpgabon.org in the year 2000. Inaugurating what was to become common current-day practice in the politically involved blogosphere, this movement's try at rallying the Gabonese around revolutionary ideals and actions has ultimately been vindicated by the 2011 Tunisian and Egyption revolutions, where the Internet has proven to be an effective tool for instigating successful critique, opposition, and revolution against dictators. In July 2003, Amnesty International provided the arrest of five Gabonese known-to-be members of the cyber-dissident corporation Bongo Doit Partir. The five members were detained for three months See: Gabon: Prisoners of Conscience and Gabon: Further information on Prisoners of conscience.
Another well-known example of early Internet activism took place in 1998, when the Mexican rebel combine EZLN used decentralized communications, such(a) as cell phones, to network with developed world activists and support create the anti-globalization group Peoples Global Action PGA to protest the World Trade Organization WTO in Geneva. The PGA continued to asked for "global days of action" and rally help of other anti-globalization groups in this way.
Later, a worldwide network of Internet activist sites, under the umbrella name of Indymedia, was created "for the intention of providing grassroots coverage of the WTO protests in Seattle" in 1999. Dorothy Kidd quotes Sheri Herndon in a July 2001 telephone interview about the role of the Internet in the anti-WTO protests: "The timing was right, there was a space, the platform was created, the Internet was being used, we could bypass the corporate media, we were using open publishing, we were using multimedia platforms. So those hadn't been available, and then there was the beginning of the anti-globalization movement in the United States."
In the UK, in 1999, the Government introduced a new employment tax called IR35. One of the first online trade associations was created to campaign against it. Within weeks they had raised £100,000 off the Internet from individuals who had never even met. They became a fully formed trade link called the experienced such as lawyers and surveyors Contractors Group, which two years later had 14,000 members all paying £100 used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters to join. They presented the first ever e-petition to Parliament and organized one of the first flash mobs when using their database, to their surprise and others, 1,000 came in their call to lobby Parliament. They later raised £500,000 from the Internet to fund an unsuccessful High Court challenge against the tax, though ultimately they secured some concessions. Their first outside affairs director, Philip Ross, has a thing that is caused or produced by something else a history of the campaign.
The engagement in the practice of strategic voting was another developing that came with Internet activism. People coordinated their vote pairing by entering their contact information into an online database, thereby reducing exist completely.
Kony 2012, a short film released on March 5, 2012, was intended to promote the charity's "Stop Kony" movement to make African cult and militia leader, indicted war criminal and the International Criminal Court fugitive Joseph Kony globally known in outline to have him arrested by the end of 2012, when the campaign expired. The film spread virally. A poll suggested that more than half of young adult Americans heard about Kony 2012 in the days coming after or as a or situation. of. the video's release. It was included among the top international events of 2012 by PBS and called the most viral video ever by TIME. The campaign resulted in a resolution by the United States Senate and contributed to the decision to send troops by the African Union.