Virtual Sit-Ins

A virtual sit-in is a tactic used by electronic activists and Internet activists as a means of taking action against corporations and governments through their websites. The action is conducted entirely online, and its name is drawn from the sit-ins of the civil rights movement, whose purpose was nonviolent civil disobedience. During a virtual sit-in, thousands of participants simultaneously try to access a particular target website, rendering the server slow or collapsing it completely.

The goal of a virtual sit-in is to prevent others from accessing the target website by overloading that site's server. One of the reasons virtual sit-ins are so popular is that often the only action required is to visit a website, which has allowed the phenomenon to become an effective, easy-to-participate-in form of activism. The strategies behind virtual sit-ins have evolved from users crashing servers from the number of people trying to access the website, to using shareware Java-based tools, Perl-based tools, and scripts that can “ping” servers so frequently that they are impossible to access.

Three groups in particular, the Electrohippies, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Rtmark, are known worldwide for their successful “hacktivities.” Since the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people have digitally swarmed the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Pentagon, corporations, universities, and governments. In 1998, Electronic Disturbance Theater held one of the first virtual sit-ins. The action was in solidarity with the Zapatistas and was directed against the Mexican government. The Electrohippies, an international collective, orchestrated their first virtual sit-in to coincide with the 1999 WTO/IMF (International Monetary Fund) meeting in Seattle, Washington. The action amassed more than 500,000 people who couldn't be at the protest in the street but decided to contribute to an online presence.

Virtual sit-ins are part of a new wave of technology-based protests that are lauded in part for enabling ordinary citizens to access and affect the policies of local and national governments, as well as corporations. Many activists prefer online actions because they are a legal means of affecting the flow of information while creating a collective presence of nonviolent disturbance.