ProtestUSA
Log in

How this works

ProtestUSA shows what people across the US are protesting, where and how it went. It doesn't take sides. Here's how it's put together.

Where the protests come from

  • Research data: the Crowd Counting Consortium, a university research project that has recorded US protests since 2017. It's published a few months after the fact, so recent months fill in over time.
  • Upcoming listings: public events from Mobilize, refreshed every day.
  • Verified organizers can list their own protests directly. Groups prove who they are with an email at their own website's address or a public post.
  • Community listings: members can add a protest with a link to the organizer's announcement. A moderator checks it before anyone else sees it.
  • Every event page lists its sources and a confidence score based on how many independent sources agree. The same protest from two sources is merged into one.

Crowd sizes and counts

  • Research estimates are shown as a range.
  • People who were there can add a crowd estimate. Once at least three are in, we show the middle value, after dropping extreme ones.
  • "I'm going" and crowd estimates are anonymous: after a day they become plain totals, and nothing links them to an account.

Moderation

  • Every photo and video is cleaned (location and camera data removed, videos re-encoded) and waits for a moderator before anyone else can see it. Moderators turn down anything showing people who could be identified.
  • Reports from newer members are reviewed before they appear. Forum posts appear right away and can be flagged; enough flags on an upcoming protest hide it until a moderator looks.
  • Moderators can ban accounts that spam, threaten, dox or mislead. "Post without my name" hides your name from the public, not from moderators, so abuse can still be stopped.
  • The rules are in the community guidelines, and they apply the same way to every cause.

What we keep private

  • No ads, no trackers, no outside scripts or fonts, and no record of who read which page. The server keeps no access logs.
  • We never keep a record of who went to which protest.
  • Your email, follows and optional profile answers are never shown to anyone. Phone numbers are checked once and kept only as a scrambled fingerprint.
  • The full details are in the privacy policy.

How the feed is ordered

  • Coming up: protests within the distance you chose, soonest first. If you picked issues, those come first.
  • Latest: recaps, approved photos and videos, and forum threads near you or about your issues, newest first.
  • Trend note: the issue (among the ones you picked, if any) whose protest numbers changed the most compared with a year earlier.
  • That's all. There's no engagement score, nothing learns from what you click, and no cause or side is boosted or held back.
  • The area and issues you pick for the feed are kept in your own browser, not on our server. If you're logged in, the feed also uses the places and issues you follow and your weekly-email ZIP code, which you chose to save with us.

Staying neutral

The site shows what's happening. It doesn't endorse protests, causes or organizers, and the same rules decide what's listed, how it's ordered and what's removed, whatever the cause. Issue labels and the "lean" of a protest's claims come from the research data or the organizer's own words, and they're labeled as such.

Who pays for it

It's run by one person and paid for by donations and shirt sales, with the founder covering any gap. Every cost is listed on the support page. The data is free to reuse through the data API.