• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 11, 2012

Reddit intends to black out its site for 12 hours next Wednesday, administrators said this week. The move marks the social news site's latest attempt to rally opposition to the Hollywood-backed Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect-IP Act.

“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action,” the company said in a blog post. “Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.” 

SOPA and Protect-IP provide for court orders banning ad networks and payment processors from doing business with “rogue” sites, or dedicated to infringement. The proposals also provide for court orders banning search engines from returning certain results, and orders banning Internet service providers from putting traffic through to certain URLs.

Some content owners others argue that the law will help stem infringement, particularly by companies that operate outside the U.S.

But numerous Web companies, Internet engineers, law professors and digital rights advocates say the legislation won't effectively curb piracy and will impede free speech. Critics point out that even if ISPs filtered out domains, users could still reach the sites by typing in the numeric IP addresses. Users also could access IP addresses through servers located outside the U.S. Additionally, critics point to the danger that sites with legitimate content could be shut down, if they're wrongly identified as "rogue" sites.

Reddit previously organized a boycott of domain hosting company GoDaddy due to its support of the legislation. GoDaddy responded by withdrawing its support for the bills. Shortly after forcing GoDaddy to back down, a campaign on Reddit apparently spurred Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to denounce the proposals.

Reddit is hardly the only Web company to lobby against the bills. But it's the only company so far to publicly commit to going dark in protest; Google, Facebook and others reportedly are considering a similar move.

Meantime, blogging platform WordPress said it was breaking its “no-politics rule” in order to campaign against the bills. “Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web,” the company said. “How would you feel if the web stopped being so free and independent?”

And on Twitter, more than 5,000 users have changed their profile pictures by adding an anti-SOPA badge from the site BlackoutSopa.org.