Section 230 Protects Social Media Platforms That Censor Pro-Lifers, Trump Wants it Repealed

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Dec 2, 2020   |   11:52AM   |   Washington, DC

Big Tech is increasingly censoring pro-life and conservative organizations and media outlets like LifeNews.com and huge social media platforms like Facebook and twitter can get away with it in part because of the extensive legal protection they are afforded under Section 230. And President Donald trump wants it repealed.

Trump is threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense spending bill, unless Congress agrees to repeal Section 230.

President trump tweeted Tuesday night that Section 230, is “a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity.”

“If the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act . . . I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill,” Trump continued.

Conservative and pro-life groups have long fought against Section 230, which is supposed to provide tech companies with liability protections against illegal content posted by third-party users but has been exploited to allow such platforms to censor pro-life groups. Facebook and twitter have been among the worst as they throttle content, allow third-party factcheckers to erroneously claim content is false, demonetize pro-life platforms and block pro-life groups from advertising while allowing abortion activists to do so.

Even Prescient Trump has been aggressively censored — which has prompted conservative groups like the Media Research Center to launch a campaign taking on Section 230 and Big Tech censorship.

“Our position is that if they can do it to the president of the United States, they can do it to anyone, and in fact that is exactly what is happening,” said Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell in a virtual launch event on Sept. 17. “Every platform in Silicon Valley today is censoring conservatives.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has frequently criticized Big Tech in part because she’s been the victim of censorship.

Follow LifeNews.com on Instagram for pro-life pictures and videos.

She said that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) should not be used as “a shield, an opaque shield, by Big Tech. Because if that is what they’re hiding behind whenever they are censoring you. So it should be a shield for new companies, but this is more of a sword for Big Tech companies. What we are doing with Section 230 reform is clarifying who can use it, when they use it, how they are going to use it, and what it can apply to. And we’re changing language, removing that otherwise objectionable language that has caused or allowed Big Tech to say well we find this, that, or the other objectionable.”

Kelly Shackelford, the president and CEO of First Liberty Institute and a member of #FreeSpeechAmerica’s board of advisors, said: “What we are seeing in the tech world right now is the greatest danger and encroachment to freedom of expression and thought, I think, in the history of our country.” He continued, “Tech companies are now an information highway, common couriers. And they control this information, and they’re engaging in extensive censorship.”

In one example, Facebook censored an advertisement from a pro-life group that exposes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for supporting abortions up to birth. The censorship comes days after Facebook censored a pro-life news story from LifeNews.com exposing how Kamala Harris tried to put pro-life advocates in prison for uncovering how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies.

The national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) is calling foul after Facebook banned two of its ads exposing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s support for late-term abortion in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, based on a factually incorrect third-party “fact check” from The Dispatch. The factcheck has been refuted because it falsely claims Biden

The censored ads, which expose the Democratic Party position in support of abortion on demand up to birth, are the latest example of a longstanding pattern of bias on the part of Big Tech companies against pro-life speech, SBA’s president told LifeNews.

“Big Tech and the media are teaming up to run interference for the Biden-Harris campaign on what is a losing issue for Democrats – their shameful support for abortion on demand through birth. This is the latest example of Facebook censoring political speech and is perfectly timed to shut down SBA List’s vital digital communications as we work to reach eight million voters in key battlegrounds in the final days before Election Day,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser.

“Our ad makes the same factual argument Vice President Pence made about the Biden-Harris record in support of late-term abortions during the vice presidential debate, an argument Kamala Harris didn’t bother refuting herself. Our argument is also backed by the Democratic Party platform, which flatly calls for no limits on abortion,” she added.

“When Facebook shut down similar ads of ours in 2018, they were forced to admit we were wrongly censored and apologized. Now they have outsourced their censorship to the anti-Trump press, continually waging a suppression campaign specifically targeting pro-life conservative voices. We refuse to be silenced,” Dannenfelser said.

The largest social media web site in the world started censoring a a LifeNews.com article exposing how vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris attempted to put pro-life journalists in prison for exposing how the Planned Parenthood abortion business sold the body parts of unborn babies.

In August, LifeNews.com ran an article from Liberty Counsel, a pro-life legal firm that has represented Sanda Merritt, who worked alongside David Daleiden to expose the Planned Parenthood abortion company for selling body parts like hearts and livers of babies killed in abortions. After over a dozen undercover videos exposed Planned Parenthood staff members on the record explaining how they changed abortion procedures to secure aborted baby parts to sell to make enough money to possibly afford Lamborghini sports cars, Harris launched a retributive effort to charge the pro-life journalists with criminal charges in an attempt to put them in prison.

As the article explains:

Five years ago, it was former California attorney general Kamala Harris (now senator and VP candidate) who launched the investigation into the work of Sandra Merritt and David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, after these citizen journalists discovered and produced videos documenting Planned Parenthood’s illegal trafficking of aborted baby body parts.

Under California law, conversations that “may be overheard” are, by definition, not “confidential” and can be recorded without consent. The recorded abortionists admitted under oath that their conversations with Merritt and Daleiden could be overheard by others in the public spaces where they were recorded, and they took no steps to prevent others from overhearing their candid discussion of what Planned Parenthood does behind closed doors. Therefore, the undercover videos produced by Merritt and Daleiden did not violate California video recording law.

But that did not stop Planned Parenthood and Harris from wielding a politically motivated prosecution against the two citizen journalists.

With Harris running for vice president, the article has received new life and has been shared over 572,000 times on Facebook. That raised the attention of Politifact, one of the various liberal media outlets Facebook uses to factcheck and potentially censor conservative and pro-life content with which it disagrees.

Politifact issued a factually incorrect and misleading “false” rating on the article that leaves out considerable information and distorts the facts of how Harris persecuted these pro-life journalists so aggressively she ordered her agents to raid Daleiden’s home.

Based on that misleading factcheck, Facebook is now censoring the article — a decision that deprives Americans of important information about a vice presidential candidate just days before they head to the polls in a critical presidential election. Any Facebook user sharing the article is met with a false and misleading warning before they are allowed to post it, and any posts of the article carry the same misleading warning.

Facebook is also censoring the story exposing Harris by limiting its distribution and censoring any Facebook page or group that shared the story because Facebook makes it clear that when pages get a strike from a factcheckers that it will throttle the page’s content.

It’s ridiculous that Facebook censors content and limits views based on false and misleading ‘factchecks’ from liberal media factcheckers with a history of supporting abortion. Facebook should be a robust forum for free speech, not in league with places like China that limit and censor what people say.

LifeNews has posted a refutation of the false factcheck and any Facebook user can post this refutation without any misleading censorship or warning.