Virtual Sit-In

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What Does Virtual Sit-In Mean?

A virtual sit-in is a type of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) where activists and protesters voice their opinions by simultaneously accessing a website multiple times, creating disruption of the target website. The term name is derived from the popular non-violent form of protests popular during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s.

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A virtual sit-in is also known as a virtual blockade.

Techopedia Explains Virtual Sit-In

A virtual sit-in is geared toward slowing down a target website or even crashing it completely, thereby preventing access by regular users. It is meant to recreate the type of public disruptions caused by actual sit-ins in public areas through occupying and effectively preventing proper operations. However, this is difficult to accomplish because of technological advancements and increased Web server capabilities.

For example, in a real world sit-in, protesters may go to a coffee shop and order the cheapest item on the menu and sit in the shop for hours or days until they are forced to leave, thereby undermining service to other customers, causing the shop to lose money and customers for the protest’s duration. A virtual sit-in can occur in any public location or event, like a street, library or meeting.

A virtual sit-in is actually a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but far less harmful in application, as modern Web resources are more than capable of handling large amounts of traffic. It would take thousands or millions of coordinated individuals to participate in a virtual sit-in before its effect would be akin to that of an actual DDoS attack involving botnets and automation.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.