Internet Activism - Examples of Early Activism

Examples of Early Activism

One of the earliest known uses of the Internet as a medium for activism was that around 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 remain fixed until a new CD-ROM was issued.

In response, a mass e-mail and E-bulletin-board campaign was started, which included 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 about 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 good idea to get out while there is still time."Over 30,000 people contacted Lotus and asked 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 form 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 protest against the Criminal Justice Bill which outlawed outdoor rave festivals and "music with a repetitive beat"

In 1995-1998, Z magazine offered courses online through Left Online University, with being taught 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 living 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 attempt at rallying the Gabonese around revolutionary ideals and actions has ultimately been vindicated by the 2011 Tunisian and Egyption revolutions, where the Internet has proved to be an effective tool for instigating successful critique, opposition and revolution against dictators. In July 2003, Amnesty International reported the arrest of five Gabonese known to be members of the cyber-dissident group 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 group EZLN used decentralized communications, such as cell phones, to network with developed world activists and help create the anti-globalization group Peoples Global Action (PGA) to protest the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva. The PGA continued to call for "global days of action" and rally support 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 purpose 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 on-line 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 association called the Professional Contractors Group which two years later had 14,000 members all paying £100 each to join. They presented the first ever e-petition to Parliament and organised 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 external affairs director, Philip Ross, has written a history of the campaign.

Voter March, an Internet-based advocacy group founded in November 2000, was formed in response to the debacle of the 2000 Presidential election recount. Voter March built an online community of activist members with more than 60 state and local chapters. Membership in Voter March email lists and Yahoo egroups was over 10,000 individuals. On March 10, 2001, Lou Posner, the founder of Voter March, was a plenary speaker at the "Grassroots Use of the Internet" conference at Yale University.