GoDaddy shut down anti-abortion group’s whistleblower website in Texas, prolifewhistleblower.com.
and Epik appear to have done the same.
The story began with the Texas Heartbeat Act, taking effect last Wednesday. According to it, it’s illegal for anyone to help women get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions.
Anti-abortion group, Texas Right to Life, took advantage of the new law, encouraging citizens to report those people at a dedicated whistleblower website named ‘prolifewhistleblower.com.’ It further promised to hold the ‘lawbreakers’ accountable for their actions.
However, Texas Right to Life seems to have violated GoDaddy’s Terms Of Service in the process. As stated in the Terms, website operators may not collect/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. Furthermore, they cannot permit others to do so.
Going on, clients cannot use the web hosting platform in a way that ‘violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity.’
After Gizmodo notified the web hosting provider of the issue, they were quick to take action. GoDaddy gave the anti-abortion group 24 hours to find an alternative.
A spokesperson had the following to say to The New York Times and The Verge:
We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service.
After it was cut off, ProLifeWhistleblower tried to use as a hosting provider. However, they breached its terms as well, so the website was shut down once again.
Then, web host Epik, the provider that also helped save Gab, Parler, and 8chan when other web service providers wouldn’t take them, took over ProLifeWhistleblower during the weekend.
However, the site still had uptime issues, even when Epik stepped in. Users reported HTTP 503 error codes when trying to access the website. At last, it started showing an “accessed a banned URL” error.
Epik also informed Texas Right to Life that hosting the anonymous tip form was against its terms of service, according to General counsel Daniel Prince’s statement to The Verge.
Currently, prolifewhistleblower.com redirects to Texas Right to Life’s primary website. It no longer allows citizens to submit anonymous tips. Epik takes credit for this, claiming it has “persuaded them to stop collecting anonymous tips and to take it off the Internet entirely.”
