Report: Pinterest Bans Pro-Life Site After Putting It on Porn List
Pinterest has banned LiveAction.org, a well-known pro-life website, from its platform after marking links to the site as pornography, Live Action said Tuesday morning.
Live Action posted to its Twitter account a screenshot of a notice from Pinterest Support claiming Live Action’s account was permanently suspended “because its content went against our policies on misinformation.”
The notice, seen below, says Pinterest doesn’t “allow harmful misinformation” on its platform. Pinterest does not provide any specific information about how Live Action is spreading misinformation or which information is incorrect.
.@Pinterest has just permanently BANNED Live Action, claiming we are causing “immediate and detrimental effects on Pinner’s health or public safety.” #LifeCensored pic.twitter.com/jTBLurzI4j
— Live Action (@LiveAction) June 11, 2019
Although Pinterest’s notice seems impersonal and sterile, what’s going on behind the scenes may be even more disturbing.
According to a Live Action news release, an Pinterest insider discovered the pro-life site had been put on a porn list.
“The video [from] an undercover investigation conducted by Project Veritas, a watchdog group founded and run by James O’Keefe, shown below, features an anonymous whistleblower who is an employee of Pinterest, claiming to have discovered inside communications confirming that a top official at Pinterest intentionally added LiveAction.org to the blocked list of pornography websites in February of 2019,” Live Action noted.
“What this means is that when Pinterest users attempted to create pins linking to any content from LiveAction.org, they were prevented from doing so. As shown in the video below, Project Veritas team members ran a test and were unable to create pins with links to LiveAction.org.”
https://youtu.be/ko43yVdowMU
Live Action employees ran this test as well, and discovered they were unable to post pins to their own site but could to other pro-life sites.
And that’s not all.
“The whistleblower who spoke to Project Veritas also notes that Pinterest ‘hide[s] content’ from what it considers to be ‘conspiracies’ which Pinterest believes cause ‘active harm’ to users,” LiveAction.org’s release noted.
“Among these so-called ‘conspiracies’ is the Center for Medical Progress‘s undercover work exposing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in harvesting the body parts of aborted children, exposed by David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who are currently still involved in court battles presided over by Planned Parenthood-involved judges after being charged with felonies by Planned Parenthood’s political allies,” the website said.
As of Sunday night, users were still unable to link to Live Action content.
However, after Project Veritas reached out to Pinterest for comment, the platform made an internal change so that pins could once again link to LiveAction.org.
“Then, as of Tuesday morning around 4:39 a.m. EST, Pinterest suddenly and inexplicably permanently suspended Live Action’s account,” Live Action wrote in its news release.
Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, is not pleased.
“Based on the evidence provided, it appears that Pinterest intentionally added ‘LiveAction.org’ to a ‘pornography’ blocklist in an effort to suppress our pro-life content from being shared on the platform,” she said in the release.
Rose attributed Pinterest’s actions to “a concerted effort to sideline a leading pro-life organization the only way they knew how.”
“This does not appear to be a simple mistake,” she said.
“When confronted with an appeal, [Pinterest’s] employees doubled down and kept LiveAction.org on the pornography list.”
Rose claimed Pinterest is targeting Live Action “because our message is so effective at educating millions about the humanity of the preborn child and the injustice of abortion.”
Pointing out the hypocrisy of Pinterest’s actions compared with their mission statement, Rose explained, “Pinterest says that their mission is to ‘help empower people to discover things that they love,’ but despite the fact that millions of people love babies and the pro-life cause, they are secretly censoring our life-affirming messages.”
“Pinterest users deserve to know the truth and our messages deserve to be treated fairly” Rose said. “If Planned Parenthood can promote their message on Pinterest, then Live Action should be able to as well.”
Conservative Tribune, a section of The Western Journal, reached out to Pinterest for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication of this article.
But it appears Pinterest has joined the ranks of big tech companies who are actively taking steps to censor, deplatform, ban and limit the viewpoints with which they disagree.
“Pinterest trying to secretly and dishonestly censor free expression is every Pinterester’s worst nightmare,” Rose pointed out, according to the Washington Examiner.
“We urge them to allow free expression on their platform and to stop censoring Live Action’s pro-life message.”
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