As one of the technical volunteers to the Open Rights Group Censorship Monitoring Project I decided to track how the campaign went on Twitter using the DataSift platform.

Tweets by Time of Day

Message Reach

Whenever someone sends a tweet it is seen by all their followers. Over the course of the day a minimum of 2,985,023 people saw the #CensoredUK hash tag.

If we allow for duplicate tweets (same hashtag but different content) then the #CensoredUK message was seen a minimum of 3,959,409 times by followers alone.

Everyone cares about Internet Filters

Not that it was a surprise but it was interesting to see the rich mix of people (and reasons) for opposing ISP Filters.

By using profile names one can extrapolate gender and see that a significant number of woman also took part in the discussion.

Campaign Differences

The Protecting our Children website has only inspired 1,391 tweets in the 5 months it has been online whereas the #CensoredUK Day of Action involved a minimum of 4079 people with only 1 day notice and 38,276 people have signed the petition to stop Internet Filtering

Common Themes

Worst ISPs?

83% of tweets about ISP censorship mentioned the ISP O2 with BSkyB, ThreeUK, BT, EE and Plusnet also getting mentioned negatively.

The only ISP to be mentioned in a positive light was Andrews and Arnold thanks to their strong stance against filtering.

Does this make O2 the worst ISP for over blocking the UK Internet? Well once the Censorship Monitoring Project Probes start rolling out we’ll find out!

Keep up the good fight everyone and if you want to know more about Internet Censorship or want to help fight it then look at donating / volunteering to the Open Rights Group.