We recently wrote about how an offensive website was taken offline by complaints.
In particular, we talked about the tactics that were used to take them down and whether they were a good thing for the internet or not. The two tactics described were:
- Complaining to the ISP that the site breached their terms of service. We said this risks reducing opinion on the internet to the level of whatever a company’s PR department finds acceptable.
- Using copyright complaints over the site’s use of a photo without permission. Taking down an entire site over what is arguably a reasonable use of an image is an affront to freedom of speech and shows how dangerous these US-style shoot-first-ask-questions-later copyright laws are.
The article attracted a fair bit of comment both for and against the use of these tactics. We also received some new information and thought it was worth posting a followup.
Continue reading Website takedowns: a followup →
This is a post about the tactics used to take down a New Zealand website hosted in the the USA and what they mean for the Internet. (Update post.)
The website
Soon after the Christchurch quake, a website (christchurchquake.net) was published that said the quake was God’s punishment for Christchurch’s tolerance of homosexuality, with God being especially annoyed by Gay Ski Week. The website also made a number of other very odd claims concerning a conspiracy of “Phoenician-descended swamp lesbians” headed by Helen Clark that had taken over New Zealand.
The takedown
The site is no longer available (Google cache here). This is because a number of people found the site highly offensive, and some of them decided that they would do what they could to get the site taken off the Internet.
The author of the site could not be identified so most action was aimed at getting Bluehost, a company based in the US state of Utah, to take it down. Two main tactics were employed:
Continue reading Taking down websites you don’t agree with →
Defending civil liberties in the digital age