Conflict of Pinterest
People come to Pinterest for all kinds of things. But apparently, there’s one thing users won’t find on the app – and that’s tolerance.
People come to Pinterest for all kinds of things. But apparently, there’s one thing users won’t find on the app – and that’s tolerance. It was supposed to be a harmless site, a place for swapping recipes and planning kitchen remodels. Now we know: even the most innocuous platforms aren’t immune from Big Tech’s censorship. And if that’s the case, conservatives are in trouble. Because the problem just got a whole lot worse than we thought.
Eric Cochran was an employee of Pinterest, a software engineer. Like a lot of conservatives in the online world, he kept his views to himself. He knew Big Tech was doing “some bad stuff,” but he didn’t realize how bad until earlier this year, when the number of pro-life laws started exploding across the states. Suddenly, the company’s “trust and safety chains” started calling more “all hands” meetings about what they could do to smother this conservative enthusiasm. Eric started digging into Pinterest’s product code, employee messages, and policies. The more he dug, the worse it got. The company was quietly blacklisting conservatives, and nobody had any idea.
At first, Live Action thought it was a mistake. Their followers kept trying to pin the pro-life group’s messages on their boards and couldn’t. Pinterest, it turns out, had blocked LiveAction.org as a porn site – meaning that none of its links could be posted by users. When Eric got wind of it, he gathered up all of the documents proving that Pinterest was hiding or silencing conservatives and sent them to Project Veritas. James O'Keefe published it, outing Pinterest as another radical liberal operative trying to shut down open debate.
As most of us found out after, Pinterest didn’t just reclassify Live Action. They also labeled conservatives “white supremacists,” banned Bible-related search terms, and scrubbed any pins with the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood’s organ harvesting ring as “misinformation.” (An interesting term, since even an independent forensic team found them completely authentic.) Almost immediately, Twitter and YouTube tag-teamed on the cover-up. They deleted Project Veritas’s content from their sites, and – in Twitter’s case – suspended the account altogether.
The outrage from most users was automatic. “Misinformation?” fumed Madeline Fry. Is that the new term for anything the Left disagrees with? The platforms all tried to defend themselves, arguing that they were just protecting company privacy. Liz Wheeler at One America News couldn’t believe her eyes. “This is CRAZY. Twitter is now censoring Project Veritas for publishing ‘internal communications’ from @Pinterest in which they call @benshapiro a white supremacist. Did Twitter apply this so-called privacy standard to Wikileaks? Or HRC’s emails? Or Trump’s tax documents? NO.”
Eric, meanwhile, the courageous employee who’d exposed the real agenda, was escorted out of his office by security and fired. He was tired of people believing that “maybe it was just a bug. Maybe it’s just an accident. Or, a rogue employee or something.” This time, he told me on “Washington Watch,” “we had proof.” “I saw a Big Tech company saying … behind closed doors that they believe that Live Action shouldn’t have a platform to speak. And the big thing is: I want them to have to … say this publicly instead of behind closed doors.”
The thing is, it’s not just Pinterest. I mean Pinterest is huge, but here’s the thing. This is the mindset of people in Silicon Valley, where we’re seeing the normalization of censorship. And the biggest thing – really the biggest thing – is that this is an all-out war on pro-lifers… because the establishment, the powers that be, see that Roe v. Wade is going the way of the dinosaur, and they’re doing whatever it takes. They are 100 percent in to protect the abortion lobby. You’re seeing that in Big Tech and you’re seeing that in Big Media… and the normalization of this censorship is downright unAmerican.
There are a lot of pro-lifers in the tech industry, Eric insisted. “…[But] they need to expose what’s going on. They need to make these tech companies explicitly say that ‘We are on the side of the abortion lobby.’ … All they see are liberals who agree with liberals, and then, "people like me, of course, are afraid of what will happen if we say anything different. But I think that’s gonna change.”
Deep down, the Left knows as well as we do: the real abortion war isn’t going to be won in courtrooms or legislative bodies. It’s going to be won in the hearts and minds of the people. And those hearts aren’t going to be changed by a political debate. They’re going to be changed by pictures, personal stories, and a confrontation with truth and science. Pinterest knows it. YouTube knows it. Twitter and Facebook and Google too. That’s why they’ve gone to such extensive lengths to muzzle pro-lifers. The truth is on our side, and they know it.
So what do we do? Refuse to be silenced. “That is my big message to all pro-lifers right now,” Eric said.
This is the watershed moment. This is the time to show people what’s happening in Big Tech. We have so many pro-lifers in the tech world who know what Google and Facebook are doing. And I know there [are] so many people who have been afraid of what to do next. But I want to let you know, pro-lifers in these, in these tech companies that see this corruption and see this censorship, come to Project Veritas. People have your back Real journalists, real investigative journalists, are listening to your story. Big Tech is all in protecting the abortion lobby. So my question to pro-lifers is, are you all in? Because there’s no more waiting. This is the moment.
Originally published here.
Pro-life Town Tells Abortion: No Trespassing!
There isn’t a more dangerous place to be these days than in the womb. With liberals making even born babies a target, it’s no wonder communities like Wascom, Texas are taking matters into their own hands. If there are sanctuary cities for immigrants, the city decided, then they can certainly make a sanctuary for people just as important: the unborn.
Wascom, Texas wasn’t exactly on most people’s radar. This week changed all of that, when five leaders of the local community (population: 2,189) made national news with its unique perspective on the abortion debate. The Texas town, which is literally on the border of Louisiana had been talking with pro-lifers in the neighboring state. There was some concern, they said, that if the Pelican State’s new abortion law took effect, there’d be pressure to put a clinic near Wascom. It would be the perfect place for a group like Planned Parenthood to lure women over the state line.
Pastor Ivy Shelton, who heads up the First Baptist Church in town, said no one in the city wanted to take that chance. “We’re the last town in Texas on I-20 before you go into Louisiana,” he told me on “Washington Watch.” “And so with that in mind, we had the thought – let’s try to be, rather than be reactive towards this, let’s try to be proactive towards this… And so, [we] began the process of putting a resolution and an ordinance in place.” After all, he pointed out, the unborn need asylum too.
Things happened pretty quickly. “We had [a] rally on Sunday night, and then Tuesday they got the city council and the citizens of Wascom got to hear the resolution, the wording of the ordinance. And… the city council voted unanimously to adopt it, making this a sanctuary city for the unborn.” At least two of the councilmembers go to Pastor Shelton’s church, so I asked him if any of it was controversial. “Our main goal of course is not to get political,” he explained, “but our main goal is to be scriptural. And so I just shared with our congregation the reasons that we are pro-life.”
He took them through the passages of Jeremiah and Psalm 139 and shared how God has plans for every person before they’re born and how God is active in the pregnancy – as David said, “knitting me together in my mother’s womb.” “I wanted to show them all the reasons from scripture why we are pro-life. And of course that was not a hard sell for our congregation. Our congregation is pro-life across the spectrum. We have folks that are engaged in this issue. We have folks that are engaged in foster care. We’ve had young ladies that have decided to have their babies and their parents and grandparents have stepped in and helped them raise their children. So just across the spectrum we try to be pro-life as a church. And so the church was just awesome with all of this.”
We’re called, he pointed out, “to be salt and light in our culture.” “I think far too often – just in in general – the church has been on the sidelines. And I think it’s time that we get off the sidelines and we get into that public discourse.” That’s not always easy, he knows. In fact, there are already rumblings that the Left will come after Wascom to scare other cities away from doing something similar. But that doesn’t bother Pastor Shelton.
We come to this with the full knowledge that Satan is not going to be happy with this measure – and he will be actively working within the systems that he influences to come against us. It will be a battle. I think our mayor said it will – that we will no doubt be sued over this. And there’ll be a court battle, and it’s one that we are expecting. But that’s okay. That’s not the thing that we spend our time worrying about. Mainly we just want to keep our focus on Christ, and we believe that he’ll take care of us and all of this.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
