Here’s a company that seems to protect sploggers and disinformation spreaders: Bluehost.
One of the disinformation splogs had a Cloudflare account, which hid their real host.
I filed a DMCA report, as this splogger was stupid enough to use my photo. These seem to get through the Cloudflare system better than things classified as ‘other’.
Cloudflare advised that Bluehost was the host. Their email said, inter alia:
Abuse Contact:
————–
[email protected]
We have notified our customer of your report.We have forwarded your report on to the responsible hosting provider.
You may also direct your report to:
1. The provider where [redacted] is hosted (provided above);
So I did. I said that not only was there a DMCA issue here, but the entire page was disinformation. I included the Cloudflare email. This wouldn’t have been a problem with any other host.
However, Bluehost responds:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Bluehost.It appears the owner of the domain is using the reverse proxy service provider, Cloudflare, to mask the true IP address of the website. This means we cannot accurately determine the true host of the site and must recommend that you contact Cloudflare directly. Cloudflare will redirect your complaint to the current hosting provider so that it can be addressed accordingly.
Should you have any other questions please feel free to contact us again.
Yeah, I already knew this. It was in my original email. And they don’t know who their own customers are without Cloudflare telling them? Pull the other one.
Dear Bluehost Customer Support:
I’ve already done this, otherwise I would not have even approached Bluehost to begin with. Note that in the very first paragraph of my message to you I had already gone through Cloudflare.Please see the Cloudflare email below.
For the sake of clarity, the issue I contacted you about is in addition to the case below.
And once again I included the Cloudflare email.
Bluehost:
Hello,
If the domain is hosted within our network, Cloudflare will reach out to us. Once we receive Cloudflare notice, we will proceed in the next steps.
Does anyone read there?
Hello:
Sigh, Cloudflare’s already done that. How did you think I got put on to Bluehost in the first place? It was on their advice that I reached out to you.This was in my original email. I even included the Cloudflare email.
If you’d care to read what was in my original email, you’ll know why I contacted you directly.
And to save you digging up Cloudflare’s email from nine days ago, here it is again, right below.
I’ve a feeling Bluehost is giving me the run-around when I’ve done nothing wrong here, but your customer has, according to your AUP. Why are you protecting them?
Now, before you sploggers think you can hide with these schmucks, do consider that if they’re this bad dealing with me, they probably won’t be competent in dealing with you, either.
This is precisely why I was hesitant at doing take-downs of the disinformation sploggers at host level.
Fortunately, Bluehost is in the minority at being this incompetent. Maybe they went to the same customer service training school as Amazon?
Thanks to hosting companies with more brains than Bluehost, Google’s results are looking cleaner. I know I need to examine Bing’s and Mojeek’s, which don’t tell the same story, but I’ll have to start with the biggest player.
This is through hours of work to preserve my reputation against the massive disinformation I’ve faced this year—and others are bound to face in the future as “AI” does its thing. We already know that we can blame algorithms for this. It’s a far cry from when most of the results were BS—and there are plenty on subsequent pages that are. But we’ll start with the ones at the top and work our way down.
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