The leftie meltdown over the Texas “heartbeat” law and the Supreme Court’s inability—on procedural grounds not on the merits—to intervene is ignorant, hysterical, and hyperbolic. These perpetually outraged people are exhausting. And ridiculous.
Anyway, the ignorance of the law and of the Supremes’ decision appears to have resulted in the deplatforming of a Texas pro-life tip website. GoDaddy gave the site 24 hours to find another host.
The Texas Right to Life group will have to find a new hosting provider for its website that encourages people to report violations of the state’s restrictive new anti-abortion law.GoDaddy took action after Gizmodo reported that Texas Right to Life’s new website, prolifewhistleblower.com, seems to violate a GoDaddy rule that says website operators may not “collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another user or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.” GoDaddy’s terms of service also say that customers cannot use the web hosting platform in a way that “[v]iolates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity.”GoDaddy now says that the website has less than 24 hours to find a new hosting provider. “Last night we informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have violated GoDaddy’s terms of service and have 24 hours to move to a different provider,” GoDaddy told Ars in a statement. . . . . GoDaddy told Ars that “the site violated multiple provisions, including, but not limited to, Section 5.2 of our terms of service.” That section is the one that prohibits sites from using GoDaddy to “collect or harvest… non-public or personally identifiable information” without people’s prior written consent.
Honestly, this seems pretty legit to me. But how many leftie sites does GoDaddy apply this policy to? And yes, that matters, for a policy to be a policy and not a weapon, it must be applied fairly and across the board.
And it’s not just GoDaddy, Digital Ocean apparently hosted the site for a few hours before also removing the right to life group’s website. They now appear to be hosted by Epix, but the site is not accessible as of this writing.
Ars Technica continues:
Update at 6:15 pm ET: Texas Right to Life responded to our inquiry, saying that its “IT team is already in [the] process of transferring our assets to another provider and we’ll have the site restored within 24-48 hours.””We will not be silenced,” the group also said. “If anti-lifers want to take our website down, we’ll put it back up. No one can keep us from telling the truth. No one can stop us from saving lives. We are not afraid of the mob. We will not back down.”Update at 9:45 pm ET: The website went offline briefly but is now back. Its new hosting provider, Digital Ocean, also has rules against violating people’s privacy, including one that bans “[c]ontent that… is intended to harass, abuse or invade the privacy of any individual.”While the abortion whistleblower site points to Digital Ocean name servers, its domain registrar is Epik, which has served controversial platforms such as Gab, Parler, and 8chan.Update at 12:35 am ET on September 4: Digital Ocean has apparently cut off hosting service, as the anti-abortion website is now using Epik for its name servers and as its domain registrar.
I’m not a fan of “snitch” sites, and I had a great deal to say about Obama’s “flag the fishy” website when it was run out of the White House and later about AttackWatch and its various incarnations.
These ridiculous endeavors were cancelled by their owners in the face of severe mockery and pushback, not by their web hosts, and this is an important distinction.
I may not like the Texas pro-life abortion snitch site, but it is (or should be) up to them to shut it down (in the face of severe mockery and pushback), not to some leftist pro-abortion activist web host.
The leftist urge is always to control, silence, oppress, and suppress. That is not good for a free and open society . . . as they well know.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY