Four Republican Senators, including Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, have written a letter to Facebook over their recent pro-life censorship of Live Action:
NATIONAL REVIEW – Four Republican senators sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this morning, criticizing the social-media platform’s recent “fact check” of pro-life organization Live Action. In a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by National Review, Senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Ted Cruz (Texas), Kevin Cramer (N.D.), and Mike Braun (Ind.) condemn what they call Facebook’s “pattern of censorship” and call on the group to submit to an external audit.
At the end of last month, Facebook notified Live Action that fact-checkers had given a “false” rating to two videos shared by the group’s president Lila Rose. One featured Rose herself and the other featured Dr. Kendra Kolb, a board-certified neonatologist; both videos included the claim that abortion is not medically necessary. After bestowing a “false” rating on the videos, Facebook prevented Rose and Live Action from promoting or advertising content and alerted users who had shared the two videos that they had spread “false news.”
These Senators call Facebook out for their fact-checking bias, using pro-abortion groups to fact-check the videos by Live Action:
But as the senators’ letter points out, Facebook’s “fact check” was conducted by two abortion providers, both of whom also have formal ties to abortion-rights activist groups: Daniel Grossman, who is on the board of NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, and Robyn Shickler, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health.
“No reasonable person would describe Grossman or Shickler as neutral or objective when it comes to the issue of abortion,” the letter states, “yet Facebook relied on their rating to suppress and censor a pro-life organization with more than 3 million followers.” The letter calls this a violation of “Facebook’s supposed commitment to non-partisanship.”
The senators note that this incident is just one example of significant “bias against those with conservative viewpoints, especially on the issue of abortion,” not only at Facebook but also at Twitter, Google, and Pinterest. “You have repeatedly insisted that these numerous instances of discrimination, censorship, and suppression of speech are merely glitches, not evidence of systemic bias,” they add.
This is exactly the problem with these leftist social media organizations. Instead of choosing ‘neutral’ fact-checkers in order to fight ‘fake news’, they choose other leftists to do the fact-checking, as if that’s in any way fair. And we end up on the short end of the stick almost every time.
National Review reports that the letter calls on Facebook to correct the problem and reinstate Live Action by removing their restrictions. They also want Facebook to submit to a meaningful “external audit”.