This past week, unbeknownst to many people, Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter commenced a purge of the social media accounts of internationally respected pro-life groups and well-known supporters of the pro-life issue. In one case, LifeNews.com had 20,000 of its Twitter followers scrubbed without notice or any charge levelled that they had violated Twitter’s terms of service.
The speed with which Facebook and Twitter are deplatforming and erasing the followers of perfectly law-abiding groups and citizens is frightening and poses an existential threat to freedom of speech and democracy itself.
Facebook and Twitter are now behaving more like political activists than impartial information providers. It wasn’t today or yesterday that these companies started to reveal their true colours, but with the acceleration of the clampdowns on free speech that have happened in the past week, it behoves everyone to take the threat much more seriously.
It’s high time that some checks and balances were introduced to protect freedom of speech and safeguard against politically motivated censorship and shadow-banning by the tech giants.
The pro-life movement needs to urgently join forces with other defenders of free speech to fight the social excommunication measures being imposed by Big Tech, which are clearly ideologically driven and set a terrible precedent for the future if not quickly corrected.
It is somewhat reassuring that the behaviour of Facebook and Twitter in recent days has wiped billions off their collective market value. Hopefully it’s a sign that investors and shareholders realise that the model under which these companies operate cannot survive by blatantly and unjustly trampling on the civil liberties and freedoms of a significant percentage of social media users globally.