I had an odd experience with this website, and I’m finally writing it up. The short version:

1. In August 2024 I wrote a blog post that documented how a local “independent journalist” had written for white nationalist websites.
2. In October 2024 he filed a DMCA complaint with my host (Netlify).
   1. Netlify support rubber-stamped the complaint without giving me a reasonable way to appeal.
   2. I moved to CloudFlare and cut the blog post back to a few essential facts+links, to make it easier for the next overworked support person to interpret.
3. In February 2025 CloudFlare approved another DMCA complaint from someone who’d copied my entire post to a content mill and backdated it!

This post will mostly focus on the 2nd DMCA complaint, as it’s the most interesting one.

My post was copied to… MormonFind.com?

On February 14, while on vacation, I received the following email:

Cloudflare received the below copyright infringement complaint regarding your account. If the content identified in the complaint is not removed within 48 hours, Cloudflare will take steps to disable access to the content, consistent with section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Please note that these steps will include disabling access to the reported URL on which the content is located, which will affect any other content located on the same URL.

Complaint Information:

Reporter’s Name: Aaron Bennet

Reporter’s Email Address: <redacted>

Reporter’s Title: Copyright Infringement

Reporter’s Company Name: Bennet Media Association

Reporter’s Address: <redacted>

Reported URL(s): hxxps://www[.]reillywood[.]com/blog/riley-donovan/

Original Work Description: https://mormonfind.com/2024/04/10/riley-donovan-contributes-to-white-supremacist-websites/

To respond to this issue, please reply to [email protected].

Sure enough, at that link (archive) was the text from my original post:

I replied immediately:

It looks like the complainant has copied my blog post and posted it on that mormonfind.com website so they can file a DMCA complaint. That website is an obvious content mill and this complaint was not submitted in good faith.

I even took the post down (worried that they were going to nuke my entire site):

I’ve taken the content down for now but it’s really concerning that Cloudflare would accept a DMCA complaint like this. It should be clear that a content mill described as “Mormon Find the Best News For You!” is not a real news website.

Alas, I never heard back and I don’t know if a human ever read my emails. CloudFlare blocked the post but not my whole website, and I enjoyed the rest of my vacation.

Further Investigation

This was all very frustrating, but also kind of fascinating. Someone had put a lot of effort into getting this one post taken down! Mormon Find wasn’t an especially convincing website, but it was good enough for its purposes.

I poked around a bit and found the sitemap (archived link) for Mormon Find, which turned out to be a basic WordPress site. And conveniently each post had a Last Modified date:

From the sitemap I gathered that:

1. The site had been “seeded” with an initial round of 30 generic news posts in 2022
2. In February 2025 the owner posted another ~40 articles including:
   1. My blog post, backdated to 2024
   2. What looked like a critical review of a dog supplement, backdated to 2023

Pretty clever right? Set up a generic looking website, leave it on ice for a bit, and then use it to do evil SEO.

Lessons Learned

1. It’s pretty easy to abuse the DMCA to get content taken down online! The process is very biased towards the complainant.
2. I should probably pay for web hosting. Web hosts are (understandably) not willing to spend much effort defending their free users.

Update

An hour or so after I published this, CloudFlare seemed to unblock the post they blocked in February - but it seems to be a cached version of the page from a few months ago. I don’t know what the heck is going on.