So all day while I was nodding my head in righteous agreement with sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Imgur, Google, Craigslist, Amazon and even the websites for my company’s products (Intuit, so like, Quickbooks Online and the like) either completely blacked out service or linked to protests for the SOPA and PIPA bills, I eventually thought: hey, I have a site (or something), I wish WordPress would let me do the same. Not that blacking out my blog would have ANY effect on generating momentum for the opposition to these bills (really, I think people would be able to go a while without reading up on week-old posts of pictures of my daughter or lists of movies), but I wanted to do something to show my support.
And so I logged into WordPress and BAM, totally a link there for me to display an anti-SOPA/censorship banner in the top right of my page. COOL! And it gets to stay up there ’til the 24th. Now, naturally this will come back to haunt me when the government builds its case against me in our dark, Orwellian future, but as of now I can live in the moment and stand up against something I feel is utterly and wholly unacceptable by opting to display the “stop censorship” banner.
In brief, the SOPA and PIPA bills would in their own cute way have language included that would give the government unmitigated authority to shut down any website it deems unfit to be on the internet (for reasons they can justify in whatever manner they please). Naturally that’s terrifying, and I encourage you to read up on it and learn about it for yourself. You can do so by givin’ an old click on that banner up there.
So, while I wasn’t able to black out my blog, I can still show my support and I hope you’ll join me in learning about and opposing these bills.
Thanks!
