Before the Supreme Court ever ruled, the early web was already in mourning: thousands of homemade pages turned black, blue ribbons spread through copied HTML, and ordinary speakers suddenly wondered whether their libraries, health resources, art, jokes, forums, and personal pages could become criminal evidence. Reno v. ACLU grew out of the Communications Decency Act, a law meant to shield minors from sexual material online but written broadly enough to threaten adult speech across a messy, hand-built internet where everyone entered through the same front door.

In 1997, the Court refused to treat the internet like broadcast television. Justice John Paul Stevens’ opinion recognized that going online required searching, clicking, subscribing, typing, and choosing, and that this new medium carried the full range of public expression: email, chat rooms, newsgroups, mailing lists, and personal pages. The ruling struck down the challenged CDA provisions and gave the young internet one of its defining constitutional moments: a declaration that online speech deserved powerful First Amendment protection before platforms, feeds, and algorithms took over the public square.

Read the original article: https://medium.com/@dia_91230/june-26-the-blue-ribbon-case-265a7c41196c

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