One of the most disgusting facets of the new Texas anti-abortion law is that it includes a reward of up to $10,000 to anyone who snitches on a woman who is attempting to get an abortion in the state.
Texas Right to Life has set up a website which allows people to report women who might be in violation of the new law, but a tech writer believes she’s found a way to get the website taken down once and for all.
Tech journalist Shoshana Wodinsky penned an article for Gizmodo in which she suggests the best way to have the Texas Right to Life website removed from the internet is by reporting it to the registrar of the domain name:
“In this case, the registrar is GoDaddy — a company that’s historically known for being kind of terrible all around, but also one with a slew of rules for what its sites can be used for. Among the rules are that sites cannot ‘collect or harvest’ information about people without their consent, or do anything that ‘violates 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.'”
Reporting the medical procedures of other people would certainly be a violation of GoDaddy’s rules, and that means there’s a way to battle this problem with the power of the internet, Wodinsky writes:
“GoDaddy has its own specific tipline set up for users to reach when they see a site falling afoul of the company’s privacy rules: privacy@godaddy.com. People can also file out an abuse report with the platform, and let GoDaddy know that they’ve come across ‘content that displays personal information.’ While the examples that GoDaddy gives in the form are sites listing people’s social security or credit card numbers, the Texas tipline is a pretty clear privacy violation of a different sort.”
In other words, it’s up to us to flood GoDaddy with reports regarding the Texas abortion snitch tipline. We have internet access and that’s really all that’s required to make a difference in this case.
Granted, we can’t personally repeal the Texas anti-abortion law, but we can damn sure give its enablers some major headaches along the way.
Ladies and gentlemen: Time to grab our computers and phones and make a difference. We can do this!
