Earlier this week, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee announced she will be running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. She released a campaign video as a Twitter ad, which was quickly pulled from the site due to “inflammatory language” that would “likely evoke strong negative emotions,” according to a Twitter representative.
But what in her video was so inflammatory?
The line that was flagged detailed Blackburn’s pro-life stance: “I am 100% pro-life. I fought Planned Parenthood, and we stopped the sale of baby body parts, thank God.”
And just like that, with a complete and total disregard for the First Amendment, the video was censored for a political belief that didn’t sit well with the Twitter powers that be.
Blackburn was told she would be able to run the video as an ad again if the pro-life statement was removed. Instead, of course, she capitalized on the censorship—rallying her followers to share the video in protest of Silicon Valley:
Regardless of your political perspective, we can all agree censorship is a form of free speech suppression and social media outlets need to be held accountable. While Blackburn is blatantly conservative, Twitter’s censorship brought people from all sides to her defense.
Twitter’s censorship of Blackburn’s campaign ad has only brought added attention to the candidate and, after causing an outrage in the digital world, Twitter decided to let Blackburn run the ad again.
This isn’t an isolated problem, however. Twitter has targeted pro-life groups before, censoring Live Action President Lila Rose’s tweets earlier this year. The tweets supposedly violated Twitter’s “hate and sensitivity” policy. The “offensive” content featured images of babies in the womb, revealing facts about Planned Parenthood, and quotes about the sanctity of human life.
The pro-life group was asked to delete any tweets regarding the defunding of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, or any images of preborn children. If this doesn’t sound like the beginning of some weird dystopian world, I don’t know what does.
With Twitter attempting to control the information we receive, we as the pro-life movement have a responsibility to share life-affirming information with those around us. Because, no matter how hard they try to hide it, the truth is that abortion is bad for women.
