It all started in with the Communications Decency Act. Back in 1996, faced with Bill Clinton’s signing of the telecom bill that would have allowed for unprecedented online censorship, rights activists were looking for a novel way to leverage widespread opposition. As Clinton prepared to sign the law, a campaign was announced, urging website owners to turn their pages to black; for 48 hours, thousands of sites went dark in protest.

The tactic re-emerged eight years later upon the release of Danger Mouse’s now-famous The Grey Album, which mashed up the Beatles’ The White Album with Jay-Z’s The Black Album. Despite approval of Danger Mouse’s work by Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, rights holder EMI attempted to halt distribution. In response, activist group Downhill Battle urged websites to host The Grey Album for free download for 24 hours in protest, arguing that its sampling constituted fair use. On the day of the protest, dubbed “Grey Tuesday,” over 100,000 copies were downloaded.

A DRM activist at a Free Culture protests in 2005. Photograph: fcb/FlickR Photograph: fcb/FlickR

Nearly eight years after that, Italian users of Wikipedia reimagined the tactic for a third time, blacking out the pages of Italian Wikipedia in protest of a wiretapping bill proposed in their country. It was this third action, which took place in October 2011, that inspired the now-famous SOPA blackout of 2012, during which thousands of websites all over the world went dark in opposition to the United States’ Stop Online Piracy Act.

It was perhaps the widespread nature of that protest – participants included Reddit, Wikipedia, and BoingBoing – that solidified the tactic for digital rights activists everywhere, giving rise to its use in places as diverse as the Philippines, Lebanon, Jordan, Malaysia and Egypt. And its success in canceling the proposed bill has inspired a new generation of activists to fight back.

When news of a Turkish draft bill to increase censorship of the Internet emerged in January, Turks took to the streets to protest. Some Western media outlets seemed surprised by the intensity of these protests, but perhaps they shouldn’t have: like website blackouts, street protests against online censorship have a deep history.

In 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested and charged with trafficking in a software program that allowed users to circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material, invoking anger from legal scholars and rights groups and spawning protests in more than twenty cities. The charges against Sklyarov were eventually dropped in exchange for him agreeing to testify against his company, ElcomSoft. In the end, ElcomSoft was found not guilty.

The Stop Watching Us rally in Washington DC, 2013. Photograph: naomiwolf/FlickR

Four years later, the NYU chapter of Free Culture initiated a protest against DRM, the rights management technology used to prevent sharing and copying of digital materials. And in 2008, Tunisians took to the streets after the Ben Ali government attempted to block Facebook; that ban was overturned in less than two weeks. And even in China, where organising protest can be dangerous, a particularly civilized demonstration occurred against Green Dam in 2009.

But it wasn’t until 2012 that offline protests of online issues really began to gain steam. Coinciding with the SOPA blackouts were the mass protests across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a proposed treaty with remarkable similarities to SOPA. While the demonstrations ranged in scale from country to country, the turnout in Poland was remarkable, with more than 10,000 citizens taking to the streets. Opposition lawmakers joined in as well, donning Guy Fawkes masks in parliament.

Since then, not only has the range of tactics expanded, but so has their geographic scope. Protests on the streets of Istanbul, Mexico City, and even Washington have numbered in the thousands. Petitions abound in dozens of languages. Blackout-style protests in Jordan and the Philippines garnered widespread participation from across sectors. And truly global efforts like the Declaration of Internet Freedom have managed to be inclusive of communities like the Aymara Nation that don’t often see such projects localized into their native languages.

Instanbul protests against internet filters, May 2011. Photograph: kevglobal/FlickR

The success of both the SOPA and ACTA protests have undoubtedly inspired a range of new tactics worldwide. What has enabled this zeitgeist is an intriguing combination of factors: worldwide Internet penetration in 2012 hit a whopping 7bn (compared to a meager 361m in 2000), with Facebook users topping out that year at 1bn. The year 2012 may also have represented the peak of global attempts at Internet censorship; just one year after the Arab Spring revolts, countless countries were reeling at the possibility of an Internet-enabled revolution (after all, even though Facebook didn’t cause the Egyptian protests, Mubarak’s Internet shutdown certainly helped them pick up steam).

As more and more governments attempt to crack down on online speech, there are several possible outcomes. While this generation has become accustomed to watching sites disappear from their view, the next may take for granted the version of the Internet that lay before them, never questioning what may be beyond their view. On the other hand, as awareness of censorship increases, so might attempts to create a sense of global solidarity against censorship.

While views on speech often differ from culture to culture, the reaction to the NSA’s online surveillance project has been swift and global. A set of principles demanding an end to mass surveillance (full disclosure: these were developed in part by my organisation) has attracted signatories from hundreds of countries, united in their opposition to dragnet surveillance everywhere. At the same time, engineers and developers are working together across national lines to build software and tools that will help users everywhere protect themselves against spying.

The fight to protect digital rights is most certainly an uphill battle, but a new generation of activists is ensuring that it’s not a silent one.

