Scaling Peaceful Protests
Scaling Peaceful Protests
Protests have been organized all around the states for the past week. People went to airports to express their disagreements and anger at new laws and regulations. But I wonder, how would this be scaled digitally and have the same desired effect as on-ground protests!
Peaceful protests usually block roads, or obstruct public service only by having big peaceful crowds in one place at the same time. This sends a strong message and force governments or even corporations to listen to the crowds and resolve the issue. The cost of not listening would be too high, losses would be in millions of dollars.
I wonder, how a peaceful digital protest would be?! I am not talking about a protest that is organized online, and performed on the ground. I am not talking about a Facebook protest where all participants have the same profile picture. I am not talking about social media shaming campaigns. I am not talking about signing online petitions. I am also not talking about harmful hacking attacks.
I am simply talking about a scalable repeatable model for a protest that is peaceful, organized and performed online, and has the same effect of real protests on the ground. A one that forces the other party to listen to the crowds or else get obstructed and lose millions of dollars.
Here are some ways I imagine a peaceful scalable repeatable digital protest could be:
Traffic Overload:
- Mimicking big crowds on the street, if hundreds of millions of users from all over the country or maybe the world visit a specific website at the same time and keep hitting refresh, the website will eventually crash. This will not only disturb the owners of the website, but also cost them so much money in hosting and forces them to listen.
Email Overload:
- If hundreds of millions of people keep send the same email message to every email address at that entity domain name every day, that entity would never be able to do business until it resolves the issue. The business losses during the period of the protest in days or even hours would be tremendous.
Spam Marking:
- If hundreds of millions of people follow the newsletter of the company/entity in question, then mark every received email from that company/entity as Spam, then all email servers will learn that it’s spam, and will start sending them by default to the spam folders.
Account Reporting:
- If hundreds of millions of people report a twitter account or a youtube video as abusive or offensive at the same time, twitter, youtube or any other company would differently listen.
Advertisement Exhaustion:
- If hundreds of millions of people want a company to listen, they can simply find their ads on Google by search (if they have google ads), and then just keep clicking them! The company’s ads budget will be exhausted in minutes!
- Or just find a website where their are ads for that company, and keep refreshing until the ad appears then click it, same will happen. This might also force ads-hosting websites to never post ads for that entity again because they can’t handle all the protesters traffic! And because other advertisers will stop advertising on that website because it has all this invaluable traffic for them (they would be paying for almost fake traffic).
I think you get the idea. Sky is the limit when it comes to peaceful scalable digital protests! It’s time to take actions!
God Bless America!
