On February 1, 1996, U.S. Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, a telecommunications reform bill containing the Communications Decency Act. Timed to coincide with President Bill Clinton'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 Communications Decency Act's curtailment of free speech. The Turn the Web Black protest, also called Black Thursday, was led by the Voters Telecommunications Watch and paralleled the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thousands of websites, including a number of major ones, joined in the protest. The campaign was noted by major media such as the CNN, TIME magazine and The New York Times.

The Communications Decency Act which gave rise to the protest was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on June 26, 1997.

References

• Anthony Collings (February 7, 1996). Home pages to go black in protest. CNN
• Julian Dibbell (May 1996). Town Criers for the Net. Wired Magazine, Issue 4.05.

External links

• Initial announcement from Center for Democracy and Technology
• Copy of Yahoo! homepage on xarch
• Rant on the Occasion of the Signing of the Communications Decency Act by Howard Rheingold
• Too Little, Too Late by Joel Snyder
• How Many Sites Went Dark?: An Educated Guess by Michael A. Norwick, retrieved from the Internet Archive