Today was the internet’s big protest day against SOPA and PIPA, and not surprisingly, there was plenty of discussion about the issue on Twitter. Specifically, the company tweeted that that there were more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4pm Eastern time.
The top terms were SOPA, Stop SOPA, PIPA, Tell Congress, and the hashtag #factswithoutwikipedia (referring to Wikipedia’s anti-SOPA blackout, natch).
So how impressive was the Twitter turnout? Well, the company likes to release “tweets per second” stats for events that spur the most activity, but a company spokesperson told me Twitter doesn’t have those numbers for SOPA. Still,, Twitter says it saw 8,868 tweets per second, for example, during the MTV Music Awards, which adds up to more than 2 million tweets in four minutes. It’s an apples-and-oranges comparison, but suggests that anti-SOPA tweets weren’t quite at that level.
Speaking of Twitter and SOPA, the company seems to be protesting the bill in a manner similar to Facebook — rather than blacking out or otherwise altering the Twitter service to show opposition, executives posted anti-SOPA messages on their personal accounts. CEO Dick Costolo wrote: “Please join me in urging Senators @SenatorReid & @ChuckSchumer not to rush #PIPA vote.”
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Dick Costolo is the founder of Feedburner which was acquired by Google in 2007. He is currently the CEO of Twitter. He has also performed in Chicago’s Annoyance Theater and various improv shows and festivals.
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