A virtual sit-in is a form of electronic civil disobedience deriving its name from the

sit-in A sit-in or sit-down is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest, often to promote political, social, or economic change. The protestors gather conspicuously in a space or building, refusing to m ...

s popular during the

civil rights movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United ...

of the 1960s. The virtual sit-in attempts to recreate that same action digitally using a

distributed denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

(DDOS). During a virtual sit-in, hundreds of

activists Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fr ...

attempt to access a target

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

simultaneously and repetitively. If performed correctly, this will cause the target website to run slowly or even collapse entirely, preventing anyone from accessing it.

Examples

On December 21, 1995, the first world Virtual sit-in, conceived b
Tommaso Tozzi
was created by the Florentine grou

against the French government to protest against the nuclear tests in Mururoa and was defined as
"Netstrike"
On Thursday May 1, 1998,

Ricardo Dominguez Ricardo is the Spanish and Portuguese cognate of the name Richard. It derived from Proto-Germanic ''*rīks'' 'king, ruler' + ''*harduz'' 'hard, brave'. It may be a given name, or a surname. People Given name *Ricardo de Araújo Pereira, Portug ...

and Stefan Wray held a virtual sit-in in which they decided to attack the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

(WEF). They did this to support their particular beliefs against

anti-globalization The anti-globalization movement or counter-globalization movement, is a social movement critical of economic globalization. The movement is also commonly referred to as the global justice movement, alter-globalization movement, anti-globalis ...

. With over 160,000 people who attended the virtual sit-in for reasons that they could not take to the streets of New York City protest. More than 40,000 also downloaded software which made a

DDOS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

attack easier was also recorded. The attack lasted all of Thursday and Friday night.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Virtual Sit-In Politics and technology Civil disobedience Activism by type

Examples

See also

References