Bangalore: Just between midnight and 4PM (Eastern Time) yesterday, Twitter witnessed 2.4 million tweets related to SOPA that contained words and phrases like ‘SOPA’, ‘PIPA’, ‘Tell Congress’ (the American one, of course), and #factswithoutwikipedia (which incidentally was about Wikipedia’s blackout). The topic was shared more than 344,000 times on Facebook, and 125,000 times on Google+, as millions of people used various forms of social media to communicate, inform each other, and stand for a cause.

Google hosted a link to a petition yesterday which required people in protest of the acts to sign. The petition was signed by 4.5 million people within that one day, and the signees were required to give their social security numbers, and voter address. Avaaz, another website that was created “to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere”, published a post in November last year about Congress’ debate to censor the internet, and has got 1,670,189 signatures (the number at the time of writing) since then.

All this and epic instances of political protests carried out in the recent past via social media especially in countries like Egypt (for a change in government), Saudi Arabia (the online protests to allow Saudi women to drive) and Libya (the Arab uprising against Muammar Gadaffi and his iron rule) just go to show how many people can unite and overthrow whole governments if they chose to.

Whether we use social media as a tool to instantly connect for causes of great scope as these, however, lies in our hands.