Back in August, Facebook hit the Pro Life group Live Action with sanctions for allegedly spreading “false news.” As issue was a video produced by Live Action that said abortion is never medically necessary. This is factually true. (We can have a whole discussion on ectopic pregnancies some other time, thanks.) Facebook used two hyper advocates of abortion to fact check the video, they did not ask for an opinion from pro-life ob-gyns of anyone from the Catholic hospital system as a balance. As a result, Live Action’s ability to share posts was limited and the shares it did make were flagged saying that Live Action was known for spreading false information.

The thousands of people who shared our pro-life replies video, featuring Dr. Kendra Kolb, and a recent speech by @LilaGraceRose on the same subject were also notified that they had shared "false news." pic.twitter.com/m7Pjjs2mTv

— Live Action (@LiveAction) August 30, 2019

Live Action is the largest pro-life organization in the world digitally, with over 3.6 million followers, and @Facebook has chosen to censor us at the order of:

Robyn Schickler, an abortionist.

Daniel Grossman, an abortionist & abortion trainer. pic.twitter.com/dbg57pp41Q

— Live Action (@LiveAction) August 30, 2019

Live Action is no fly-by-night group. They have over 3 million followers on Facebook and are a major player in the fight against abortion, so this got the interest of a lot of people. Four conservative senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Kevin Cramer, and Mike Braun sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter protesting the action.

Facebook removed the sanctions on a temporary basis.

Yesterday, Zuckerberg met with Hawley. Hawley, as you know, has been in the forefront of struggle to keep the tech giant from acting as a hit squad for those who would stomp out the ability of conservatives to use social media. It produced a pretty amazing result.

Zuckerberg admitted there “clearly was bias” in the @LiveAction @LilaGraceRose censorship. Said bias is “an issue we’ve struggled with for a long time.”

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 19, 2019

This is significant. I wouldn’t have expected Zuckerberg to do the right thing and divest Instagram and WhatsApp…I think it will take the Federal Trade Commission and a battalion of red-fanged anti-trust lawyers from Department of Justice to make him see the light there… but rather than the usual “mistakes were made” weasel words, Zuckerberg admitted that biased fact checkers used their position of power to take out an opponent and that the problem is systemic.

This should be a clarion call for anyone who values liberty. While a huge organization like Live Action can get the attention necessary to overturn a decision by Facebook, most publishers can’t. If RedState, for instance, ran afoul of Facebook in that way, we’d face the loss of a significant amount of our traffic and we would most likely end up folding. No platform should have that power. If the market doesn’t exist for your crap that is one thing, when a company decides that it will not let your existing market to have access to your product, that is something different. And while the “muh principles” bunch has a cow at that idea of using the force of the federal government to break these information cartels, the fact is that we either have rights or we don’t and it matters not one whit whether those rights are choked off by the federal government or if the federal government allows corporate oligarchies to abridge those rights. The preamble to the Constitution states that the government exists to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If we stand by an let a corporate monopoly to do us what our ancestors would not allow King George III and parliament to do, then it is possible that we really deserve the serfdom that comes our way.