Reddit’s decentralised model offers flexibility, allowing different communities to set their own standards of acceptability, and puts decisions in the hands of people who understand the context and have a stake in the outcome. But it is not without downsides. AFP via Getty Images/TNS
Throughout history, people have established new governments for all sorts of reasons: to solidify alliances, or expand empires, or secure individual liberties.
Marc Beaulac had a question about sweaters.
Specifically, it was about the age-old debate in offices between men who want the air conditioning cranked up and women who want it turned down. “What I was thinking in my mind is, the next stage of this argument should be me saying, ‘Why don’t you wear a sweater?’”
February 8 marked the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control .
by Joel Schlosberg
February 8 marks the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control … just in time. John Perry Barlow emailed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the World Economic Forum the day Bill Clinton signed into law restraints on free expression via the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Barlow couldn’t have foreseen that on February 2, 2021, The New York Times would print a call for incoming President Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to verify online information. He did predict that national administrative substitutes for “parental responsibilities” would fail to contain “the virus of liberty” in “a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.”
Mon, Feb 8th 2021 3:36pm
Mike Masnick
As we ve been noting in posts throughout the day, today is the day that, 25 years ago, then President Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That large telco bill included, among many other things, the Communications Decency Act, a dangerous censorial bill written by Senator James Exon. However, buried in the CDA was a separate bill, written by now Senator Ron Wyden and then Representative Chris Cox, the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, which today is generally known as Section 230 of the CDA. A legal challenge later tossed out all of Exon s bill as blatantly unconstitutional.