The hunt for the ProLifeWhistleblower site is rampant online.

This portal put online to "help" denounce women and clinics who perform abortions in Texas has become in recent days the symbol of the struggle of some American Internet users against the very controversial anti-abortion law adopted by Texas September 1.

While the Department of Justice assured, Monday, that it would support women who would seek, despite everything, to undergo an abortion in Texas, Internet users and tech groups are trying, for their part, to complicate the task of those who support the new Texan legislation.

Starting with ProLifeWhistleblower.

The TikTok tactic

The site has just lost its second host on Tuesday, September 7, and is currently without an address on the Web.

At the time of this article's publication, anyone looking to log into it was automatically redirected to the Texas Right to Life site, the most powerful anti-abortion association in Texas, which founded ProLifeWhistleblower and aided the governor of the state to draft the anti-abortion law.

This portal, without official link with the Texan authorities, was created more than a month ago in anticipation of the very restrictive law SB 8 to "help" Texans wishing to "anonymously submit" information on individuals or clinics that would violate the new legislation.

The Texan legislator has in fact instructed citizens to track down women who would seek an abortion beyond six weeks after the start of their pregnancy.

As the digital arm of a text hated by Americans in favor of abortion rights, the site designed by Texas Right to Life naturally became their number one public enemy. They started, two days after the adoption of the law, to flood the site with false denunciations.

A mobilization that began on TikTok, where influencers called on their subscribers to invent testimonials.

One of them bragged about having submitted more than 700 false denunciations while posing as the very conservative governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.

A computer scientist very active on TikTok has even developed a small program to automate the writing of bogus denunciations.

A day after it was made available to Internet users, more than 10,000 of them had used it, he told the New York Times.

This is not the first time that the famous social network, very popular among teenagers, has been used by Internet users against personalities or measures very to the right of the political spectrum.

In June 2020, former US President Donald Trump found himself facing an almost empty stadium in Tusla for one of his campaign meetings because of a mobilization of TikTok users who had massively turned registered online without intending to go.

Kick the site off the Internet

But this time around, other community sites - like Reddit or 4Chan - joined in the "tiktokers" effort to drown the site under false denunciations.

And they didn't stop there.

Calls to hosts have multiplied online in order to kick the site off the Net.

GoDaddy broke down at the start of the weekend.

The largest web host in the country - where Texas Right to Life first registered its whistleblower site - announced that ProLifeWhistleblower "violated the terms of service" for its service and needed to find a new digital home "within 24 hours."

No problem, thought the activists of Texas Right to Life, who turned to the very sultry web host Epik.

The latter is known to accept, in the name of freedom of expression, highly controversial sites like the far-right social networks Parler and Gab.

But even Epik announced on Monday that it did not want to deal with ProLifeWhistleblower.

The host explained that this had nothing to do with the political positioning of this anti-abortion site, but rather with making public online, through denunciations, details of individuals without their consent.

The Texas Right to Life association does not admit defeat, however.

"We will be back soon!" Promised Kimberlyn Schwartz, president of the movement.

But where ?

One option would be to go into exile with a host across the Atlantic, as the famous neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer did.

The latter, ironically, found refuge with a host using the ".su" domain extensions ... which had been reserved for the former Soviet Union.

In the meantime, while the online guerrilla warfare against ProLifeWhistleblower makes media noise, the real impact on the ground for women and clinics who risk paying the price of the new law is far from clear.

But even the Biden administration, officially opposed to this bill, is struggling to find a solution.

The Department of Justice promised on Monday to coordinate with the local FBI to "protect" women and clinics, without specifying what was its real leeway in the face of local power.

The UN also spoke out, judging that the SB8 law was probably contrary to international law.

But that's not what will stop Texans from hunting down clinics that would help women get abortions.

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