Reports of online censorship targeting pro-lifers continue to grow.
On Monday, pro-life podcast host Seth Gruber said Facebook removed a link to his interview with abortion survivor Melissa Ohden, claiming it violated “community standards,” The Christian Post reports.
Gruber hosts the podcast “Un-Aborted!” In January at the March for Life, he talked with Ohden about her abortion survival story, the Abortion Survivors Network and her pro-life advocacy.
Recently, “I shared the link to that YouTube clip on my Facebook page and my personal Facebook account,” Gruber said. “Shortly after doing so, Facebook notified me the post on my personal account violated their community standards.”
He said the reasons that Facebook gave for removing his post were not specific, and he appealed the action.
“They are feckless cowards. Their justification and wording was along the lines of not wanting to mislead others with incorrect information,” he told the Christian Post.
He suspected that the real reason for the censorship is Ohden’s story and its impact on the abortion debate.
“The story of abortion survivors presents a full-frontal ideological challenge to their entire premise, that unborn children are not persons with rights and that women who practice reproductive health care are exercising ‘health care.’ What if that health care choice fails, then that is a human being,” Gruber said.
“Abortion survivors are the nightmare of the pro abortion movement. Their stories are so important and powerful,” he continued. “That’s probably why they blocked it.” Watch the interview here.
Just a few days earlier, LifeNews also was censored on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. The post featured a picture of a baby with Down syndrome and information about rising abortion numbers on unborn babies with Down syndrome in the United Kingdom.
SIGN THE PETITION! Attention Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube: Stop Censoring Pro-Lifers
As LifeNews reported, the British pro-life group SPUC highlighted new government figures obtained by a member of Parliament showing the number of late-term abortions carried out on UK children with Down syndrome have doubled in the past 10 years.
Seeking to highlight those figures on the LifeNews.com Instagram account, on Friday, LifeNews posted the photo of a baby with Down syndrome and a copy of the headline with the message “Horrific!” Less than 14 minutes later, Instagram covered up the photo with a false claim that the post was “False Information” that was supposedly “Reviewed by independent fact-checkers.”
It took until Tuesday for Instagram to unblock the post.
This isn’t the first time Instagram has censored pro-life accounts. Instagram previously censored a meme by Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation. He dared to say that “abortion kills more black lives in two weeks than the KKK lynched in a century.” The image of a noose hung above the words and ended with the line, “Planned Parenthood: Eugenics. No Matter What.”
Another image censored by Instagram sought to show how similar the arguments used to defend abortion are to those that were used to defend slavery in the U.S.
And Instagram blocked the entire Daily Caller News account at one point.
Last August, Facebook also censored Live Action with a heavily biased “fact check” written by two abortionists. As LifeNews reported, Facebook tagged the Live Action post as “false news” because it explained why abortion is not medically necessary. Later, the pro-life group learned that Facebook’s fact-checking mechanism relied on two abortionists, Daniel Grossman and Robyn Schickler, who obviously have their own biases about the issue.
