Pro-lifers have been warning the public that the abortion pill hurts women for years. Here’s why Big Tech and its fact-checkers have much to answer for.
A massive study published on Monday found that around 11.2% of 154,554 women underwent a “serious adverse event” after taking the abortion pill. This percentage is 22 times higher than the less than 0.5% statistic pushed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that loosened restrictions on the abortion pill during the Biden administration. The Foundation for the Restoration of America commissioned the study. And while this study is not the first to show that over one in ten women who take the pill are seriously harmed, social media platforms and fact-checkers have censored criticism of the abortion pill for years.
MRC Free Speech's exclusive database CensorTrack shows that Google, Meta and Twitter all engaged in censorship of abortion pill criticism despite the fact that new evidence supports just how dangerous the pill can be.
In September of 2021, Live Action president and founder Lila Rose tweeted that Google had banned ads her organization created for abortion pill reversal, while advertisements promoting the abortion pill remained up.
In 2023, Facebook censored the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America for citing an earlier study showing that the abortion pill harmed women at even higher rates. Facebook hid both videos behind an interstitial, relying on a “fact-check” from PolitiFact, a signatory of the Soros-funded International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Facebook has admitted that interstitials dissuade people from clicking through to the content 95 percent of the time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to “get rid of fact-checkers” on Meta platforms earlier this year.
In March 2024, X appended a Community Note to a March for Life post highlighting the dangers of the abortion pill. The Community Note cited the FDA to dispute and minimize deaths attributed to the abortion pill.
And YouTube, which deleted the pro-life publication LifeSite News’ account in 2021, has censored and continues to censor pro-life content on a massive scale with warning label notes. The notes that YouTube attaches to videos both for and against abortion include a laundry list of minimizing euphemisms. For example, YouTube opens the current version of the note by referring to butchering a baby in the womb as “a procedure to end a pregnancy.”
Users who follow the National Institute of Health (NIH) link provided by YouTube will face further horrifying euphemisms such as “Abortion Care” and “Medical Termination of Pregnancy.” According to the current version of the page, the Trump administration has been forced to keep it up due to a court order. YouTube’s use of labels relying on this page is so ubiquitous that it was applied even to a video of Saint Mother Teresa speaking against abortion that was posted in 2015.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
