Oversight board reviewing multiple complaints
The American Center for Law and Justice has filed a brief with an oversight board for tech companies Facebook and Instagram that challenges their censorship of pro-life speech.
The fight is growing bigger and bigger in the U.S. these days just a year after the Supreme Court tossed out the fatally flawed Roe precedent from 50 years ago that created a “right” to abortion and inserted it into the Constitution.
The ACLJ said the fight right now is over the “fair and equal right to use public platforms for the communication of sanctity of life views.”
The digital corporate giants have been censoring such speech.
Now, the ACLJ said, it has delivered to Meta, the corporate ownership of Facebook and Instagram, its argument that the 300-some million users of the two computer software programs should be allowed to express their pro-life views.
The two companies, the ACLJ explained, “are an integral part of the new public square. In practice though, these powerful Silicon Valley platforms have had a troubled record when it comes to restricting pro-life messaging.”
It is Meta’s oversight board, made up of ex-judges and political leaders, journalists, legal experts, and academicians, that is reviewing three challenges to its pro-abortion ideology.
The ACLJ said it is urging the board to require Facebook and Instagram to recognize that “pro-life messaging must be protected.”
“We also pointed out exactly how that could be done.”
It explained one of the censored comments was from a pro-lifer who cited the morally bankrupt and illogical claim from pro-abortion radicals.
They “suggest that abortion somehow rescues an infant from being unwanted, and therefore is a form of compassion. The Facebook post described ‘Pro-Abortion logic’ of the ‘liberal left’ as saying, in effect, that ‘We don’t want you to be poor, starved or unwanted. So we’ll just kill you instead.'”
It was censored because it included “kill,” even though the company rules allow its use in such situations as, “Terrorists deserve to be killed.”
“Only after the pro-life Facebook user’s post was blocked and the user appealed to the Oversight Board, and two other blocked users who were pro-abortion also appealed, did Meta executives admit the error and restore all three posts. But by then, from a free speech standpoint, the damage had already been done,” the ACLJ said.
“Our arguments to the Oversight Board laid out the legal principles that ought to guide Meta content reviewers in the future based on U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment as well as international law precedent.”
The ACLJ said, “All we ask is an equal chance to make the pro-life case in the marketplace of ideas.”
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