Citing facts is now considered hate speech, according to Twitter.
LifeSiteNews, a pro-life conservative news outlet, was locked out of its Twitter account on October 18 after Twitter found an article posted four years ago violated its “rules against hateful conduct.”
In the article in question, Dr. Gerard M. Nadal, president of the Coalition on Abortion, stated that HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea were on the rise among the LGBTQ community because 60 percent of homosexual men “failed to disclose their symptoms or status to sex partners.” He cited data from the Centers for Disease Control, The New York Times, and a medical journal.
Twitter later unlocked the account after a petition of 7,400 people was sent protesting LifeSiteNews’ suspension. The platform said, “After reviewing your account, it appears we made an error.”
The argument in the piece was that sexually transmitted diseases had nothing to do with homophobia, but rather because of other reasons. Non-conservative news outlets, such as the Atlantic and LGBTQ Nation, have written on similar subjects and have cited the same sources. The Atlantic reported almost the exact same thing, with the one difference being the date — it was published in 2018, not 2014. LGBTQ Nation was not censored by Twitter for its 2011 piece on the rise of AIDS among black bisexual men. Only LifeSiteNews was censored for this.
In the notification, Twitter told LifeSiteNews that the post “promoted violence against, threatened, or harassed other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
According to LifeSiteNews, the only options to restore the account given were to either delete the post from 2014, or start an appeal process. This comes as no surprise given that other pro-life sites, organizations, and personalities have been heavily censored on social media. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) had her pro-life political ad taken down, while Live Action was told it couldn’t promote any of its tweets until it had deleted the “anti-abortion” content from its website.
The thinking behind marking the post as hate is sketchy at best. Homosexual is not a hate word, and linking the word homosexual to STDs is not necessarily hateful depending on context. Given the context here, no hate was intended.
But Twitter still won’t acknowledge that Rev. Louis Farrakhan is guilty of violating its hate speech policies, since apparently its “dehumanizing speech” policies haven’t taken effect yet.
