Pro-Life Movie "Unplanned" Being Censored By Twitter?!
Pro-Life Movie "Unplanned" Being Censored By Twitter?! A pro life film called Unplanned was briefly suspended by Twitter and as per usual it was later restored with Twitter saying it was just another mistake.But these mistakes tend to always flow in one direction, taking down primarily conservative accounts. Following the suspension several people notice another odd behavior. When they would try to follow Unplanned they would come back to find they no longer followed the account.This could be a result of weird issues that occur when Twitter suspends an account but it has been several days later and this weird phenomenon is still happening.The issue of Free Speech and censorship of social media is coming to a tipping point with politicians like Dan Crenshaw and even Donald Trump calling out the censorship. But we do have a state level bill in Florida that seeks to prevent censorship on social media.
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Twitter later claimed this was a mistake and restored the account.
Another example of mistakes tending to flow in one direction.
But, following the restoration of this account, many people noticed something else that was odd.
They would follow the account, leave, and when they would come back, notice they were no longer following the account.
Many people then going on to say that Twitter is trying really hard to restrict this information.
They may have inadvertently created a Streisand effect, meaning because they tried to censor this account, it resulted in a backlash, and now the account has over 200,000 followers.
I think there's a bit of important nuance here, and it may not be what most people think is happening.
It may not be censorship, but it is interesting, so we'll look at this issue.
But at the same time, we're hearing Twitter is considering labeling tweets that break their rules that they've chosen to keep up for public interest or newsworthiness.
Notably, Donald Trump's tweets.
A critic asked Vijay Agade, why isn't Trump getting banned?
And they said, well, because Trump's the president.
But this sets a very dangerous precedent, in my opinion.
It means they're going to be overt haves and have-nots.
That if they deem you to be relevant or important, they'll let you break the rules, and other people won't.
Seemingly a direct admission of some kind of bias.
Today, let's take a look at what's going on with the movie Unplanned's Twitter account, as well as the recent statement from Twitter about how they're going to allow some people to break the rules.
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After several users screenshotted notices of the suspension on the service and tagged Twitter and its co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, the account was restored.
Thank you everyone for your support in letting Jack and Twitter know when our unplanned movie account was recently suspended without cause.
We are back and excited for the great response we're getting in theaters this weekend.
Grateful.
Reddit's first tweet after the disappearance.
According to Twitter, Unplanned was not suspended on purpose, but rather was linked to another account that had violated Twitter's rules.
When one account violates those rules, the system then cracks down on linked accounts to mitigate the risk that the original banned account would simply move accounts.
After reviewing this case a second time, Twitter decided the Unplanned account should not be affected by the other's suspension and restored it.
It's a sad time we live in when corporations can remove individuals' freedom of speech at will.
When did we empower these corporations to have such authority?
More importantly, why do we empower them to do so?
Corey Solomon, co-writer and co-director of the film, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
They add, Unplanned, released by the Christian-focused company Pure Flix, is based on the 2009 memoir of the same name by former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson.
The film follows Johnson's rise at the clinic until she witnesses an abortion at 13 weeks and becomes a pro-life activist.
As of right now, Unplanned Movie has 259,151 followers, a massive backlash and Streisand effect, which actually generated a ton of interest in following this account.
What's interesting is Twitter's response.
First, they claimed it was just a mistake, which tends to happen very often.
We've heard about certain Republicans being shadowbanned, Donald Trump's account was once actually deleted, and every time they say it's just a mistake.
My response directly to Jack Dorsey over this was, how many grains of sand make a heap?
After we filmed the podcast in which we had the conversation, Jack said he was thinking about that and it was a good analogy.
How many mistakes do they need to make before they realize maybe there is a systemic problem on their platform pointing in one direction, especially considering they keep restoring these accounts?
But they also said the account was linked to someone else or to a different account, and that tends to be a very common excuse where they haven't actually proven anything.
It's very convenient for them to say, something happened behind the scenes, you can't see, trust us.
I don't.
But something else that's very strange, which is going viral from several users, is that when they try to follow the account, they automatically are forced to unfollow the account.
In this video, for instance.
Here you can see the man has gone to the Twitter account for unplanned, and he clicks follow.
He then backs out, goes to the home- goes to the search screen, refreshes a couple times, re-searches for the unplanned account, And then finds he is now unfollowing the account.
And he's not the only one reporting this.
Dana Lash said, About 5 minutes ago, I was following unplanned movie.
And then I just checked after seeing so many say they had trouble even following the account and somehow,
I wasn't following them anymore.
Dana posted this video where she clicks follow, and then she goes to refresh the page,
and she's no longer following the account anymore.
And another user, in the replies, did the exact same thing.
Following, reloading the page, and now they are no longer following the account.
But there is some important nuance before we move on.
Dana responded to her own tweet saying, I need to make a few points here.
When Twitter suspends an account or outright bans them, this results in a weird phenomenon happening where people's followers don't appear or slowly start returning.
It's entirely possible the reason Dana is seeing there's no followers listed is because it's fresh off of the suspension, but The suspension was a couple days ago, and this is happening today, which is why I think it's something else.
Also, when you have more than three people filming themselves following and then being forced unfollowed from the account, it sounds like something weird is going on.
I gotta say, I don't know how many times I need to make videos about the mistakes Twitter makes in one direction.
It is true that Twitter has suspended left-wing accounts, but it tends to be anti-war accounts that challenge imperialism who get removed.
They're not nearly as loud, and often people don't bring it up when they are banned, but some of these accounts do in fact get banned.
But at a certain point, you have to recognize the problems tend to flow in a certain direction, and I believe I have an idea as to why.
Dan Crenshaw tweeted, This bias has to end, Jack.
When you deliberately attempt to silence one side of the argument, you create resentment.
When you create resentment, you make our country's divisions even worse.
Dan's right, and there is something being done about this, at least at the state level.
As I've highlighted before, there is a bill in the Florida Senate called SB 1722 Social Media Websites, stating, Providing the owner or operator of a social media website is subject to a private right of action by a social media website user in this state under certain conditions.
Prohibiting a social media website from using hate speech as a defense.
Authorizing the Attorney General to bring an action on behalf of a social media website user.
The latest action was on March 13th.
It was introduced in the Senate.
I did reach out to Senator Gruters for comment.
He has not responded yet.
But I think I can try to approach a fair and reasonable reason we are seeing so many mistakes take place.
Take, for instance, the perspective of those creating the algorithm.
We've seen in Project Veritas videos some of the Twitter staff saying they'll ban people who have MAGA or American flags or some kind of Trump symbolism because they think that may indicate a bot.
While that may be true to a certain extent, it's also their personal bias.
Think about who's designing these algorithms.
Silicon Valley types.
They probably tend to be liberal.
It may be that these people don't intend to just censor conservatives, but They design algorithms in a certain way that end up pointing in one direction very often simply because of how they view the world.
Thus, when you ask them, are you targeting conservatives on purpose?
They say, no, of course not.
But when you look at their algorithms and internal reports, you realize they think mainstream conservative memes are overt hate speech or trolling.
Like what James O'Keefe discovered.
In a story from Project Veritas at the end of February, internal documents reveal that the view of many of these people, whether they realize it or not, targets general conservative behavior.
In one document, they say, yes, their meme content is seriously bad, but let's examine troll behavior more broadly, rather than just focus on content.
Trolls are involved in many destructive behaviors on Facebook, including Raids, doxing, false reporting, toxic meme creation, black propaganda, and red-pilling normies to convert them to their worldview.
We can see that in one document leak, they say that using the distinct vocabulary of cuck, zucked, re, normie, IRL, lulz, shadily, etc., they identify you as a troll.
Now that story was specifically about Facebook, but think where that logic goes.
If you ask this person at Facebook, do you ban conservatives?
They will say, of course not.
Ask them, do you censor conservatives more often?
They'll say, no, that's ridiculous.
They'll probably even testify under oath.
Why?
Because in their minds, people who show certain memes, people who say certain things like IRL, which means in real life, a very common internet acronym, They think that is a troll and not a conservative.
They don't draw the distinction between a common conservative meme and a troll behavior.
They lump them together.
I don't know what they view as a true conservative, but you can see how they have this bias.
So it's entirely possible that when we see things like this, how you can't follow a certain account, it's not because an individual was angry with conservatives or the movie, but because their internal biases resulted in them generating an algorithm Which results in many, many accidents.
But here's where it actually becomes a bit more terrifying.
CNN ran this story.
Twitter is considering labeling Trump tweets that violate its rules.
The story says, the social media company is trying to find a way of maintaining its standards while adding context to tweets from politicians and other figures that may be offensive but are important for public debate.
While on the surface, this may seem beneficial to someone like Trump, You have to realize where this goes.
First of all, what does other figures mean?
Who gets to determine what speech is in public interest or not?
Think about the ramifications of this decision.
It means there are haves and have-nots.
It means that Twitter believes regular Americans, their speech is not in the public interest.
But it is.
Are we now going to accept a world where only the famous are allowed to present ideas?
That sounds absolutely terrifying.
But think about the other figures phrase in that statement.
Who is other figures?
The danger here is that although right now Trump may be protected, they might not be able to ban him.
What happens when he leaves office?
You'll have a progressive and a conservative vying to have their ideas heard, and Twitter will say, well, this person who's conservative isn't in the public interest, and they will ban you.
But the progressive, who's being very offensive, they'll say, oh, but it's newsworthy.
We'll allow this.
We shouldn't allow a massive multinational corporation the right to choose what is or isn't in the public interest.
And they're overtly saying it right now.
We see the accidents point in one direction every single day with unplanned being just another example.
But at the end of this, when Twitter says they're going to allow some people to break the rules, they dangle Donald Trump in front of you to say, no, see, we're giving a benefit to President Trump.
And then people on the left can say, see, Trump's allowed to break the rules.
Ugh, it's so unfair.
But then all of the little people are told their voice doesn't matter.
And I think that's total crap.
But you know, ultimately, as I pointed out, this has been nothing but good news for the movie.
They now have 260,000 or so followers.
The backlash benefited the PR for this movie very, very well.
And as an aside for the movie unplanned, of course, the critics don't like it, and the audience really does.
Not that I think Rotten Tomatoes is worth anything at all.
I'm going to add the much-needed disclaimer to this video because, of course, simply because I'm talking about a pro-life movie getting suspended and having weird things happen, you'll have the left claiming that I'm somehow defending, you know, pro-life ideas or whatever.
The idea here is the right to express yourself.
It's the right for people to share their movie on social media and not be suspended because they want to make an argument.
Shutting down an argument doesn't make the argument go away.
In fact, silencing speech shuts down the first line of defense to stopping extremism.
Thus, I fully welcome the narrative and the debate from those who are pro-life, when I myself am pro-choice and have very strong convictions in this direction.
But I believe you have a right to challenge these conceptions, and I believe that you have a right to present your ideas on a public forum.
We can't allow these social media platforms to dictate what is or isn't acceptable.
It's not going to be fun for anybody when only rich, famous people can talk.
This is going to negatively impact the left as much as the right, and I can't believe That you have people on the left who don't see this.
Fortunately, there are still some people like Jimmy Dore, for instance, who are on the left and are willing to fight for free speech, even for those they disagree with.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about what happened here?
I'm not ready to say this was an overt act of censorship.
As I pointed out, I think it's the bias of the system that was built.
Don't get me wrong.
I think there are definitely biased employees at Twitter.
I think the heads of Twitter are overtly biased and don't realize it.
And then from the top down they build a system that they don't realize results in many accidents.
But how many grains of sand make a heap until your system is broken?
Let me know what you think, we'll keep the conversation going.
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