EXCLUSIVE: Pro-Life Accounts Demand Meta Lift Suspensions After Free Speech Promises
Several pro-life Facebook users are demanding their accounts be restored after Meta promised this week to support free speech on its platform.
In a letter obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, the legal counsel for LifeNews and its founder Steven Ertelt, as well as pro-life mother Abby Covington, requested Meta “immediately” restore their disabled accounts.
“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” reads the letter from their legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
In May, Ertelt found his Facebook account had been permanently disabled after he posted a video showing a doctor performing a C-section. During the procedure, the unborn child can be seen grabbing the doctor’s finger.
“An unborn baby can’t be just a clump of cells when he or she is grabbing the doctor’s hand,” read the video’s caption.
Facebook permanently disabled Ertelt’s account and informed him the post failed to follow its Community Standards on “child sexual exploitation,” his attorneys said.
Because LifeNews used Ertelt’s Facebook account to create the LifeNews Instagram account, the group’s Instagram account is effectively permanently suspended as well.
“These account suspensions have caused serious harm to Mr. Ertelt and LifeNews,” the ADF attorneys wrote in their letter to Meta.
Covington, the Christian pro-life mother of three, had her Facebook account permanently suspended after she posted about her family’s adoption journey. In her post, she described her family’s Christian faith and encouraged expecting mothers to reach out if they were thinking about putting their baby up for adoption.
“We believe children are a gift from the Lord,” she wrote. “God has given us the desire to support an expecting mother who will choose life for her baby through the gift of adoption! We love our children, and our prayer is to expand our family while providing a safe & loving home.”
Covington received a barrage of hateful messages after her post was shared in a private group, prompting her to delete it. One user wrote, “I’m adopted and I’d s*** in your mouth out of spite while you were asleep if I’d been raised that way.”
Facebook then informed her that her account did not follow its Community Standards on “human exploitation,” her attorneys said. The platform disabled her Instagram account as well as all of her Facebook accounts, including the one for her jewelry, skincare, and makeup business.
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“The animus-filled messages that Mrs. Covington received from other Facebook users were understandably distressing,” the ADF attorneys wrote in their letter to Meta. “But what is most distressing to her is Facebook’s decision to permanently disable all six of her accounts, causing her significant financial and personal harm.”
The ADF attorneys accused Meta of violating its free speech standards, breaching its own terms of service, and failing to uphold its promises. They requested the company respond to their request to reinstate the pro-life accounts by January 22.
“These situations provide a litmus test for whether Meta will live up to its public announcement or continue to censor and restrict the marketplace of ideas,” the legal team wrote.
“Facebook needs to keep the momentum going. If Zuckerberg wants to make a real impact related to censorship, he must immediately stop the weaponization of its content standards against pro-life groups like LifeNews. No group should be silenced for expressing their political or religious views on the platform. Meta’s promise to uphold free speech starts here,” Jeremy Tedesco, ADF’s senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg released a video announcing sweeping changes to his company’s content moderation policies, promising “more speech and fewer mistakes.”
“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” Meta said.
“We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression,” the company said.
Meta said it will end its third-party fact-checking program and move to a Community Notes model similar to what X, formerly Twitter, does. The company also said it will be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate” and it will also recommend more political content if a user has indicated they are interested.
Meta has been fiercely criticized in recent years for censoring political content such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, which broke just before the 2020 election.