Online censorship

Richard A. Sokerka

Leaders of pro-life groups were among those invited to a White House social media summit July 11, amid claims of online censorship by search engines and social media sites.

Scant coverage was given to their concerns in the secular media as they were lumped together with more than 200 attendees as “far-right social media provocateurs.”

“We are the tip of the spear as far as social media persecution goes,” Cary Solomon, co-writer, director and producer of the pro-life film “Unplanned,” told Catholic News Agency. “We are an example of a business that was directly, monetarily hurt by online censorship.”

Lila Rose, founder and president of the pro-life group Live Action, told the summit attendees how Live Action has been prevented from advertising on Twitter for four years, having been told by the social media company that it would need to stop calling for the defunding of Planned Parenthood and sharing its pro-life content. Yet, Twitter allows Planned Parenthood to advertise.

Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications for the Susan B. Anthony List, said search engines like Google and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube “have set themselves up as a platform where all voices are supposed to be welcomed,” Quigley said, yet “there’s been just demonstrable bias against pro-life organizations.”

Chuck Konzelman, co-director of the movie “Unplanned” said its Twitter page was taken down and lost the vast majority of its followers on its opening weekend — critical to any film, but especially to a smaller-budget film. Abby Johnson, whose conversion from a Planned Parenthood clinic manager to a pro-life activist, is the basis of the movie, could not access her own Twitter account during the same period.

In its Google searches for movie times, the film was labeled “Drama/Propaganda,” Konzelman said, “and ‘propaganda’ is not something an algorithm would assign. This was the work of a human being.”

Rose called the actions of social media companies “a double-standard. Bias is a growing problem in Big Tech, even though they say that they are politically neutral and that they don’t discriminate.”

The reach of social media is enormous. Facebook has some 1.7 billion users; Twitter has 310 million, and Reddit claims 234 million. Mobile apps like Instagram and Snapchat also are growing rapidly all the more reason why pro-life organizations need to be able to place content on these sites and not be censored.

As private companies, social networks currently can set their own rules and retain the right to moderate content, routinely screening it for instances of gratuitous violence, harassment, profanity and other offensive material.

But by choosing to relegate the pro-life movement’s content as “offensive material,” social media networks and search engines have, no doubt, created a double standard that shows a definite bias against groups that promote the right to life in the womb.

If “supposedly neutral” social networks cannot treat all who want to use their platforms the same, then legislative and regulatory measures need to be taken so that free speech and religious liberty on all internet platforms is not compromised.