Sometime before the SOPA online protest, someone had posted an image of a calendar where January 18th was marked as the most productive day ever. On January 18th, Wikipedia, Reddit, and other popular sites black out to protest against SOPA and PIPA bills, so for one day people may do their work and not be distracted by the pictures of cats. Of course that was not a message. The black out showed people what effect SOPA and PIPA could have on the Internet ecosystem: The bills would have gave authorities to censor the internet. As Prof. Herman tells us in his article that the protest turned out to be the biggest online protest in the history of the Internet.
The Internet have spoken, and on January 18th, it told the people what SOPA stood for. Participating in the protest websites posted links that explain what SOPA was and how it would affect the Internet neutrality. They were written in the same manner as the PDF about SOPA that Prof. Herman put on blackboard. So on January 18th, the word SOPA dominated the Internet. People started wondering what was that SOPA that plastered all over the web. Click after click, share after share, like after like, and the SOPA blackout became the largest online protest, and on January 20th, the Congress had voted against SOPA.
P.S. If the online protest had happened on April 23rd, then I wouldn't have been distracted by silly memes and would have written this blog post on time.
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