Twitter eventually expanded its trending section to include both hashtags and topics, which is part of transformed Twitter into a news aggregator: its Moments Trending Topics sections are where users track national conversations. So, who decides what trends and what doesn’t? Twitter’s liberal journalists—the ones who write news articles without bylines. That gives them enormous power over the national discussion.
When the Covington faux scandal exploded, Twitter fanned the flames. But when Democrats drew heat for backing late-term abortions and even infanticide, it wasn’t a Twitter trending topic. That’s not a coincidence. Twitter doesn’t just follow or reflect national conversations; it tries to direct them.
The political balance of power on Twitter has shifted substantially since Trump was elected. Many of the president’s biggest right-wing fans on Twitter are gone from the platform. And given that Twitter has become just another arm of the liberal establishment media, it seems unlikely they’ll be back. Twitter is no longer a platform of free-for-all conversations; instead, it has become part of the great liberal media echo chamber.
CHAPTER SIX Purging Pro-Lifers
Renowned Princeton professor Robert P. George is known to walk his undergraduate students through a thought experiment when discussing America’s history of racial injustice, in order to demonstrate the moral courage that abolitionists possessed. Had you been white and living in the slave-holding old South, George asks his students, how many of you would have been abolitionists? Invariably, every hand in the class shoots up. But the lopsided outcome of the vote, George asserts, is the product of hindsight-bias and wishful thinking. “Of course, it is complete nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would simply have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and, if it was in their interest, participated in it as buyers and owners or sellers of slaves,” George once explained, when asked about the exercise.1 He continued:
So I respond to the students’ assurances that they would have been vocal opponents of slavery by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show me evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have embraced causes that are unpopular among their peers and stood up for the rights of victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing (1) that it would make THEM unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by wealthy, powerful, and influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that it would cost them friendships and cause them to be abandoned and even denounced by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names, and (5) that they would possibly even be denied valuable educational and professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness.In short, my challenge to them is to show me where they have at significant risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.
The moral courage that it took to be an abolitionist in the antebellum South is the moral courage required to be a pro-life activist in America today. If you run through George’s five points again, you will easily see how they apply to pro-lifers. In America’s dominant media, corporate, and academic institutions, defending an unborn child’s right to life marks you as a “gender-traitor” if you’re a woman and as a “misogynist” if you’re a man. In many cases, you can expect to pay a price, in personal vilification if nothing else, and that’s especially true in the world of Big Tech. Big Tech is unwavering in its support for Planned Parenthood and other abortion-advocacy groups.
The Radicals
Abortion activists, liberal journalists, and Big Tech frame the abortion debate in highly misleading ways. Mainstream media coverage consistently portrays the pro-life movement as one dominated by dangerous extremists, while promoting radical, far-left organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America as mere health care providers.
In truth, Planned Parenthood and its allies who support abortion on demand are far outside the political mainstream—and the numbers prove it. A June 2018 Gallup poll found that 60 percent of America adults “think abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy. However, support drops by about half, to 28 percent, for abortions conducted in the second three months, and by half again, to 13 percent, in the final three months.”2 Those findings were consistent with Gallup’s last twenty years of polling on the subject, a senior Gallup editor noted. Polling from other reputable outlets like Marist also show that a sizable majority of Americans support significant restrictions on abortion.3 Legality aside, most Americans, in twenty years of Gallup polling, consistently say abortion is morally wrong.4
Yet, in January 2019, when New York’s legislature approved a bill allowing abortion up until birth, Planned Parenthood tweeted a video of pro-abortion activists erupting in cheers—cheering something that most Americans think is morally wrong and that is supported by only 13 percent of American adults. Planned Parenthood goes beyond extremism to ghoulishness with its PR campaigns like #ShoutYourAbortion, encouraging women to take pride in having an abortion.
Discussing the realities of third-trimester abortions—at ten weeks, you can pick up the unborn baby’s heartbeat on an ultrasound;5 at twenty-two weeks a baby will likely survive premature birth6—and having conversations about the morality of later term abortions, are the abortion lobby’s nightmare, so wherever possible, they try silencing opposing views. Within the Democrat Party, support for unlimited abortion on demand has become a litmus test that no liberal politician can afford to fail.
In 2017 and 2018, Planned Parenthood’s political arm gave $6.9 million to election committees,7 spent another $2.5 million lobbying, and wrote checks for an additional $3.8 million to support Democratic candidates, $4.1 million to oppose Republican candidates, and nearly $200,000 to undercut Democratic primary candidates who weren’t pro-abortion enough.8
Through its financial clout, the abortion lobby has frog-marched the Democratic Party to abortion extremism. From 1996 through 2004, the Democratic Party platform repeated variations of the idea that abortion “should be safe, legal, and rare.” But when Barack Obama was nominated in 2008, the party dropped “rare” from the equation, and the term hasn’t returned in any of its platforms since then.9 The Democrats’ platform in 2016 was the first major party platform to explicitly call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.10 Shortly after launching his 2020 presidential campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden felt compelled to abandon his decades-long support for the Hyde Amendment.
As extremists often do, Planned Parenthood has made common cause with other extreme organizations. It was one of a few left-wing groups that proudly stood by the Women’s March after that organization was rocked by a series of scandals exposing antisemitism at its highest levels. Women’s March leaders had publicly declared solidarity with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious antisemite who has praised Hitler and described Jews as “termites” and “Satanic.”11 One Women’s March leader, Tamika Mallory, initially defended Farrakhan by implying that religious leaders are supposed to consider Jews their enemies.12 The group was later revealed to have worked closely with Nation of Islam members, including using them for security,13 and Women’s March leaders were repeatedly quoted making antisemitic remarks.14 Yet as left-wing groups like the SPLC quietly distanced themselves from the scandal-ridden group, Planned Parenthood stood with Women’s March.15 Even the Democratic National Committee cut ties with March because it was so extreme. But not Planned Parenthood. The abortion advocate proudly supported the group and co-sponsored its events around the country.
* * *
As Planned Parenthood is silencing dissent from its agenda within the Democratic Party, the pro-abortion lobby and its supporters are trying to do the same in our cul
ture at large. Rossalyn Warren, a political activist and feminist, published an op-ed in the New York Times accusing Facebook of allowing “fake news” on its platform in October 2017. Facebook’s crime? Not censoring pro-life news websites as much as she would like.16 Warren wrote:
LifeNews, which has just under one million followers on Facebook, is one of several large anti-abortion sites that can command hundreds of thousands of views on a single post. These sites produce vast amounts of misinformation; the Facebook page for the organization Live Action, for instance, has two million Facebook followers and posts videos claiming there’s a correlation between abortion and breast cancer. And their stories often generate more engagement than the content produced by mainstream news organizations, said Sharon Kann, the program director for abortion rights and reproductive health at Media Matters, a watchdog group. People on Facebook engage with anti-abortion content more than abortion-rights content at a “disproportionate rate,” she said, which, as a result of the company’s algorithms, means more people see it.17
In other words, an op-ed piece in the New York Times argued that Facebook should rig its algorithms against pro-life content, apparently as news that’s not fit to print. Something similar happened at The Atlantic, after it ran a piece by National Review staff writer Alexandra DeSanctis (who is an unfailingly courageous voice for the unborn) titled, “Democrats Overplay Their Hand on Abortion.” Feminist author Jessica Valenti slammed The Atlantic for publishing DeSanctis’ article; DeSanctis, she said, failed to consider “the incredibly complex moral decision to extend or withdraw care to a preemie”—that is whether to let newborn babies die, if they have health problems.18 In short, the pro-abortion radicals want to shut down pro-life voices and shift the debate so that even defending the right to life of newborn infants is controversial.
And they’re not only making the case in print; they’re making it on the streets. Pro-abortion activists have taken to angrily protesting outside pro-life women’s health clinics,19and harassing pro-life women who quietly pray the rosary outside of abortion clinics. In Pennsylvania, Democratic state representative Brian Sims recorded himself accosting an elderly woman for praying outside of a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood clinic. In another video Sims posted to social media, he offered a $100 reward for the identities of three teen girls praying outside the abortion clinic.20 If you support infanticide, if you believe in silencing popular pro-life voices, if you harass women and teen girls for peacefully praying—and brag about it— then you’re clearly on the wrong side, the extremist side. And that’s the side Big Tech is on.
The Women Who Won’t Be Silenced
Lila Rose founded the pro-life advocacy group Live Action while still in high school. Her original goal was to educate her peers about the realities of abortion and to affirm human dignity at every stage of life. She continued that mission through college, and today Live Action has the largest digital following of any pro-life organization in America. Between Rose’s accounts and Live Action’s accounts, they have more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and three million followers on Facebook. But, as Rose told me in an interview, her success has been in spite of Big Tech’s efforts to bury her message:
Twitter has now for over two years completely banned our ad accounts, so both Live Action’s account and my own account. The reason that they said we’re banned from doing any type of advertising on their platform is we violate their hate and sensitive topics policy. When we’ve gone back and forth with the reps for Twitter’s policy team, we’re told that in order for us to advertise on Twitter, we would have to delete all content from our website as well as our Twitter feed that talks about what abortion is, that criticizes Planned Parenthood, that shows images of an ultrasound in the context of the pro-life fight.
Live Action was subjected to “extreme demands from Twitter management for us to be able to advertise on their platform and meanwhile Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups continue to advertise with no issues,” Rose added.
Twitter even ordered Rose to delete a tweet quoting Thomas Jefferson. The offending tweet included an ultrasound of an unborn child and contained the caption: “ ‘The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.’ —Thomas Jefferson.” That was the entire “offensive” tweet—a picture of an ultrasound and a quote from a founding father calling for the “care of human life and happiness.” No honest person would consider that Jefferson quote offensive, but once it was presented within the context of a pro-life argument, it crossed the line for the ideologues at Twitter. To be sure, the “problem” was not the content of the quote that Lila Rose tweeted; the problem was the fact that Lila Rose had tweeted it. Apparently, history is off-limits to people who profess the humanity of unborn children.
Digital advertisements help companies and organizations reach people who otherwise wouldn’t know about their products, missions, or messages; and pro-abortion activists are intent on keeping that realm for themselves.
“I was very excited about the rise of new media in the last ten-plus years, because now the traditional media are not the gatekeepers of ideas that they have been with institutions like the school system, which is increasingly leftist, and [in] academia, but if the tech companies also become gatekeepers of ideas, while at the same time doing it in a secretive way, then we have got a huge problem on our hands,” Rose told me. “Information is what changes hearts and minds. If people don’t have access to those revolutionary ideas, then they are going to be stuck in one silo of thought that, unfortunately, is a very vicious, pro-abortion, anti-life worldview. And that’s exactly what we’re fighting against,” she added. “I’m very concerned about these [pro-censorship] trends by these platforms.”
“There’s no question that Twitter has chosen a pro-abortion ideology, even though they won’t admit that publicly,” Rose told me. “Jack Dorsey—in front of a congressional committee—said ‘we don’t discriminate based on political viewpoint,’ and yet discriminating based on viewpoint is exactly what they’re doing right now in disallowing Live Action from doing any advertising and continuing to allow pro-abortion groups [to advertise without restrictions].”
“As Live Action has grown and become more formidable and expanded the reach of our platform, we’ve experienced growing hostility from social media companies,” Rose said. That hostility seems to be reflected in the social media companies’ changing algorithms, as every change has led to lower levels of engagement with Live Action media.
The algorithms are secret, but sometimes the suppression is obvious. In January 2019, YouTube deleted a Live Action video about Planned Parenthood. Curiously, the allegedly offensive video had been available on the website for nearly eight years without issue, before it was suddenly removed. YouTube warned Live Action that its allegedly inappropriate content merited a “strike” and that additional “strikes” could result in the permanent termination of their account. Live Action appealed the decision, but YouTube promptly rejected it. It was only after Rose publicized the deletion and the ensuing denial of Live Action’s appeal that YouTube reinstated the video and reversed the strike against Live Action’s account. The reality of abortion is unnerving—it’s natural to be outraged by the slaughter of a human baby—and something you won’t learn from establishment media sources whose journalists accept awards at Planned Parenthood banquets.21 So, it’s not surprising that pro-life videos draws eyeballs on YouTube. In December 2018, a writer for the left-wing website Slate wrote a hysterical article complaining that YouTube wasn’t (yet) banning pro-life results from its top search results for “abortion.”22 If Big Tech doesn’t run interference, the pro-life argument will always outperform the pro-abortion argument. And that is exactly why Big Tech insists on getting in the way.
Immediately following Slate’s article, YouTube manipulated the results for “abortion” searches to replace pro-life videos on the front page with pro-abortion content.23 Internal documents le
aked in January 2019 show that after the Slate reporter emailed YouTube about the video, the term “abortion” was reportedly added to a list of “controversial” terms, which one engineer described as a “blacklist.”24 Search results for all of the terms on the list automatically prioritize videos YouTube deemed “authoritative.” In other words, it prioritized videos from YouTube-approved news outlets. YouTube will allow videos from EWTN (a Catholic network founded by nuns) through the filter, so it can claim it isn’t biased, while burying most pro-life voices, including the pro-life videos identified by the Slate reporter. YouTube eventually claimed that the pro-life videos in question were problematic because they “contained misinformation alongside graphic images” and thus had to be pushed off of the front page.25 Both parts of that explanation are misleading. The videos in question were accurate—they only told plain truths the pro-abortion lobby doesn’t like—and only one of the videos could objectively be described as “graphic,” and it was no more graphic than many other YouTube videos.26 YouTube, for instance, has graphic heart surgery videos. The difference is that abortion-related images aren’t just graphic, they’re disturbing; they reveal the true nature of abortion—that it involves the murder of an unborn baby. You can’t see a human arm in an abortionist’s tray and come away with any other conclusion. That’s the difference between tech companies’ disparate treatment of images of heart surgery and images of abortion: the latter is a reality that liberal media companies won’t show you. As British politician and Christian evangelist William Wilberforce told the House of Commons in one of his speeches against the slave trade: “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”27 Intentionally hiding the truth about a moral evil from the public, as YouTube chooses to do, is a shameful display of moral cowardice.
The Manipulators Page 11
