The Turn the Web Black protest, also called the Great Web Blackout, the Turn Your Web Pages Black protest,
from

Center for Democracy and Technology Centre for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. CDT seeks to promote legislation that enables individuals to use the internet for pu ...

, retrieved from the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

and Black Thursday, was a February 8–9, 1996,

online activism Internet activism is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular infor ...

action, led by the Voters' Telecommunications Watch and the

, paralleling the longer-term

Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign The Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign (officially the Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Freedom of Speech, Press and Association) is an online advocacy campaign for intellectual freedom on the Internet, orchestrated by the Electronic Frontier ...

organized by the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

. It protested the

Communications Decency Act The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case ''Reno v. ACLU'', the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck ...

(CDA), a piece of rider legislation for

Internet censorship Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as Wikipedia.org) but exceptionally may extend to all Inte ...

attached to the

Telecommunications Act of 1996 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is a United States federal law enacted by the 104th United States Congress on January 3, 1996, and signed into law on February 8, 1996, by President Bill Clinton. It primarily amended Chapter 5 of Title 47 of t ...

, and passed by the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

on February 1, 1996. Timed to coincide with President

Bill Clinton William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and agai ...

's signing of the bill on February 8, 1996, a large number of web sites had their background color turned to black for 48 hours to protest the CDA's perceived curtailment of

freedom of expression Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recogni ...

. Thousands of websites, including a number of major ones, joined in the protest. The campaign was noted by major media outlets such as

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

, ''Time'' magazine and ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''.

Background

The legislation which gave rise to the protest threatened fines or imprisonment for those accused of distributing "indecent" or "patently offensive" materials without providing some way of blocking access to minors. Opponents of the bill compared this to demanding librarians assess the age of library users before allowing them access to a particular book in the collection. The Communications Decency Act was stuck down as

unconstitutional Constitutionality is said to be the condition of acting in accordance with an applicable constitution; "Webster On Line" the status of a law, a procedure, or an act's accordance with the laws or set forth in the applicable constitution. When l ...

by the

U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

in a 9–0 vote on June 26, 1997, upholding an earlier

federal district court The United States district courts are the trial courts of the U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each federal judicial district, which each cover one U.S. state or, in some cases, a portion of a state. Each district cou ...

ruling. The majority of

Justices A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a panel of judges. A judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the barristers or solicitors of the case, assesses the credibility an ...

found the CDA violated adults'

First Amendment First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

free speech rights with its overbroad suppression and

vague In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is ...

language, despite any legitimate interest of the government in protecting children from "harmful materials". A concurring minority opinion, penned by Justice

Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was both the first woman nominated and th ...

and Chief Justice

William H. Rehnquist William Hubbs Rehnquist ( ; October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American attorney and jurist who served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 33 years, first as an associate justice from 1972 to 1986 and then as the 16th chief justice from 1 ...

, argued that the law might have been constitutional if limited to situations concerning an intent and knowledge to provide indecent materials to children.

References

External links

*Dibbell, Julian (May 1996)
Town Criers for the Net
''Wired Magazine'', Issue 4.05.

on xarch
Too Little, Too Late
by Joel Snyder

by

Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold (born 1947) is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a t ...

How Many Sites Went Dark?: An Educated Guess
by Michael A. Norwick, retrieved from the

Conflicts in 1996 Protests 1996 protests {{web-stub

Background

See also

References

External links