Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be on the run in the face of growing online protests, but SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is not dead yet. “The fight isn’t over,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells me in the TCTV video interview above.
Ohanian was scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday before that hearing was cancelled. But Reddit, along with Wikipedia and other sites, will observe a self-imposed blackout in protest. In the video above, he explains why Reddit is going ahead with its blackout plans and speaks more broadly against the acts.
Just before he showed up to the TCTV studio today, Rupert Murdoch tweeted out:
Nonsense argument about danger to Internet. How about Google, others blocking porn, hate speech, etc? Internet hurt?—
Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 17, 2012
To which Ohanian commented: “This shows a serious misunderstanding of how the technology works.”
In New York City and San Francisco, anti-SOPA protestors (including Ron Conway) will take to the streets and protest outside their Senators’ offices. “I am just here in front of a camera because the whole Internet cannot fit in this room,” says Ohanian. “It has become an election issue.”
Read our full coverage of SOPA here.
Alexis Ohanian is a startup founder and investor in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis co-founded reddit with Steve Huffman, which has become one of the most popular social news websites online. After leaving his full-time post at reddit, Alexis started the social enterprise Breadpig. Described as a “Newman’s Own for nerds,” Breadpig publishes books featuring some of the most popular webcomics in the world (like XKCD and SMBC), and produces other geeky novelties like Awesomesauce and...
Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on your personal preferences and what the community likes. Your preferences are determined based on your history of voting stories up or down. The company was started by two University of Virginia grads, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in the Y Combinator program. Two others, Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz, later joined the team. Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Reddit in October of 2006....
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