Pinterest suspended LiveAction’s account on June 11, 2019 after blocking the content of the pro-life group and tagging the site as ‘pornography.’
According to LifeSite News, the San Francisco-based social media company claimed that LiveAction’s pins violated its policy on misinformation.” Pinterest sent a message to the Christian group saying, “We don’t allow harmful misinformation on Pinterest. That includes medical misinformation and conspiracies that turn individuals and facilities into targets for harassment and violence.”
Pinterest has targeted Live Action, I believe, because our message is so effective at educating millions about the humanity of the preborn child and the injustice of abortion. —Lila Rose, the founder and president of LiveAction,org
Earlier, a high-level Pinterest employee revealed that the company added LiveAction.org on its list of blocked pornography sites in February this year. The insider, later identified as Eric Cochran, divulged documents to Project Veritas revealing how Pinterest censors pro-life and Christian messages on the platform.
He said he was “pretty surprised” to find that the account was listed in the “porn domain block list.” Once a website is blocked in Pinterest, users cannot create pins that link to the site.
Project Veritas said other conservative websites, including zerohedge.com, pjmedia.com, teaparty.org, are labeled as pornography websites. Another document named “Sensitive Term List” marks Christian-related terms as “brand unsafe.” Cochran said terms such as “Christian easter” and “bible verses” are removed from auto-complete search results in Pinterest.
Lila Rose, the founder and president of LiveAction, called foul Pinterest’s move to permanently ban the organization’s account. She revealed that LiveAction, which has more than 3.3 million followers and considered as the largest online pro-life movement following, has been censored in the past.
Rose said, “Pinterest has targeted LiveAction, I believe, because our message is so effective at educating millions about the humanity of the preborn child and the injustice of abortion.”
“Pinterest says that their mission is to ‘help empower people to discover things that they love,’ but despite the fact that millions of people love babies and the pro-life cause, they are secretly censoring our life-affirming messages. Pinterest users deserve to know the truth and our messages deserve to be treated fairly,” she added.
Cochran was later fired from the social media company following his exposé. He said, “I think when public policies don’t match with how social media companies are actually implementing them, people have a right to know, people have a right to that transparency. And the thing is one person can make all the difference…one person can bring transparency to big tech.”
