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A group of U.S. senators challenged Google over the tech giants double standard and censorship of pro-life Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) ads while advertisements for deadly abortion pills are still allowed on the search engine.

We are deeply concerned by Googles decision to ban Live Actions pro-life ads promoting Heartbeat Internationals Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) hotline, the senators wrote in a letter Thursday. Googles pro-life censorship is out of step with the science and reflects an unacceptable bias against pro-life views. We insist that you immediately reverse this decision.

Google pulled APR ads from pro-life group Live Action Tuesday following a report from a group named Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The report was publicized in an article from The Daily Beast parroting abortion industry anti-APR narratives such as that the APR protocol is dangerous and not based on science. Abortion proponents regularly attack APR legislatively, in the courts, and in the media.

Quashing APR ads on the internet or social media means women seeking a second chance at choosing life for their child will be blocked from obtaining the information necessary for them to have that second chance and choice.

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Google first approved Live Actions APR ads let them run for more than four months, the senators noted, at a cost of more than $170,000 and directing thousands of people to the APR hotline.

Then, their letter states:

On September 13, Google unexpectedly shut down these ads without warning or evidence, citing its unreliable claims policy. Google has subsequently indicated that it took this action after reviewing a one-sided pro-abortion report provided by a left-leaning news agency. Google has also since stated that it censored APR ads because they made unproven medical claims, citing serious concerns from the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It is shameful that Google has acted to appease pro-abortion activists by silencing pro-life voices, rather than considering all the evidence and following the science.

Montana Sen. Steve Daines (R) spearheaded the letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Daines is the founder and chair of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus and was joined in sending the memo by Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).

Google disingenuously cites unreliable claims as their reason to ban the promotion of Abortion Pill Reversal, but has obviously failed to understand the FDA-approved treatment that the reversal technology uses, Live Action said in a statement. Live Action and pro-life medical professionals across the country are proud to promote the Abortion Pill Reversal regimen, which involves an FDA-approved, bioidentical pregnancy hormone called progesterone that has been used for dozens of years to prevent miscarriage and has already saved thousands of lives.

Heartbeat International, the largest network of pregnancy help organizations in the world, manages the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN), made up of some 1,000 medical professionals and pregnancy help centers who facilitate APR.

Heartbeat President Jor-El Godsey said there was no issue with a policy restricting unreliable claims, however the problem is that this policy is being abused.

Unfortunately, how this policy is being implemented by Google protects Big Abortion and forces women to go through with an abortion that they no longer want, Godsey said.

Tweet This: Googles pro-life censorship is out of step with the science and reflects an unacceptable bias against pro-life views"-Group of US senators

Chemical abortion, or the abortion pill, also known as medical abortion, RU-486, DIY, or self-managed abortion, is a two-drug process.

The first drug, mifepristone, destabilizes a womans pregnancy by blocking progesterone, the natural hormone necessary to sustain a womans pregnancy. This typically ends her unborn childs life.

The second drug, misoprostol, is taken a day or so later and causes the mother to deliver her deceased child, provided the chemical abortion is successful.

The abortion pill has numerous possible side effects associated with it, some severe. If complications from the abortion pill do occur, the woman is typically at home, often alone to deal with the (at times severe) side effects.

However, if a woman regrets starting a chemical abortion and she acts soon enough, she may be able to save her unborn child with APR.

The protocol entails administering progesterone to counter the first abortion drug and is an updated application of a treatment used safely since the 1950s to prevent miscarriage. A 2018 peer-reviewed study showed positive results with APR, with 64%-68% of the pregnancies saved through the protocol, no increase in birth defects and lower preterm delivery rate than the general population.

The Abortion Pill Rescue Network answers more than 150 mission-critical calls each month from women who regret their abortion decision. Women consistently report having found the APRN online after starting the chemical abortion process and seeking answers for how to reverse the abortion pill's effects. Statistics show that more than 2,500 lives have been saved (and counting) through the Abortion Pill Reversal protocol.

Live Actions ads with Baby Olivia, a medically accurate animation of human development in the womb, were pulled as well. The pro-life group has been censored on social media in the past for its pro-life message.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley (R) wrote Pichai one day earlier about Google pulling Live Actions ads and ads from Choose Life Marketing, a Missouri-based company. Hawley noted that Planned Parenthood advertising that violated Googles stated policy prohibiting using keywords related to getting an abortion were allowed by Google.

In a dramatic and unprecedented move, Google has sided squarely with extremist pro-abortion political ideology, banning the pro-life counterpoint and life-saving information from being promoted on their platform, Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action said. They arent hiding their bias anymore: Googles censorship baldly reveals that the corporation is in the pocket of the abortion industry.

The double standard decried by Live Action, Heartbeat, and the U.S. senators hinges on the fact that abortion drugs are still sold on the internet, despite the many safety risks. U.S. Food and Drug Administration health standards in place since the FDA approved the abortion pill in 2,000 stipulate an in-person exam and prescription by a certified healthcare professional in a clinical setting.

The group of 11 senators reference the abortion pills dangers and the double standard in the letter.

While banning pro-life APR ads, Google continues to allow ads for purveyors of the deadly abortion pill mifepristone by mail, despite the fact this drug has resulted in at least 24 mothers tragic deaths and at least 1,042 mothers being sent to the hospital, they wrote. Googles double standard on abortion is disingenuous and an egregious abuse of its enormous market power to protect the billion-dollar abortion industry.

The practical consequence of Googles abortion distortion is that pregnant mothers in crisis will only have the option to be marketed abortion drugs through Googles ad platforms, they said, while life-affirming alternatives are suppressed.

Tweet This: The practical consequence of Googles abortion distortion is that pregnant moms in crisis will only be marketed abortion drugs

Both Hawley and the 11 senators questioned Pichai about whether Google had recent contact with any pro-abortion entities. The Daines group wanted to know names if there was contact.

Hawley also asked about the rate at which ads from pro-life organizations are deemed ineligible and how Google ensures that its widely reported internal progressive bent does not affect ad eligibility decisions.

The Daines letter asked whether experts were on both sides of the abortion issue were consulted in the decision to ban the APR ads, or only those who promote abortion, and whether Google will also remove ads for the abortion pill mifepristone.

Again, we urge you to reverse Googles unjust and indefensible decision to suppress these pro-life life-saving APR information ads, the senators wrote, and we look forward to your prompt response to the above questions.

Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages theAbortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News.

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Congress members intervene in Google censorship of life-saving Abortion Pill Reversal - Pregnancy Help News

Censorship by the campus Left does not take a break during the school year, not even on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The latest incident of censorship happened at Washington University in St. Louis, where a student stole the American flags set out as part of the 9/11: Never Forget Project put on by Young America's Foundation. The student serves in student government. He claimed the display was in violation of school rules (it wasnt) and that he was violating no policy or law by trashing the flags (which is debatable, given that police officers had threatened to arrest him for trying to destroy the display earlier).

This wasnt even the only campus 9/11 display that was vandalized. Michigan State also saw a memorial display tampered with. And, as Jonathan Turley notes , this has become a popular trend on college campuses across the country. Left-wing students and staff now feel entitled to censor ideas they dont like, ironically, under the guise of free speech.

Washington University said that the school condemns the vandalism and that we value freedom of expression in all forms and will work to ensure that all students are able to express their points of view through appropriate channels without disrupting the rights of others to show support for causes they care about. Its a bit mealy-mouthed, but the message seems to be that the university cares about free expression and opposes censorship.

If it means that, it should start by disciplining the student who vandalized the display. According to YAF, the university has not said whether that student will face disciplinary measures. Too often, all universities do is offer a concerned statement without punishing the censorious offenders. Washington University must ensure that this kind of behavior is punished because anything less is tacit approval.

Original post:
Universities must do more to address censorship by students and staff on campus - Washington Examiner

I think Tennessee Williams accidentally wrote a love letter to the year 2020, says director Brenna Geffers of Williamss The Demolition Downtown, the short play shes staging outdoors at the Bas Relief in the towns center. Geffers, founder of the Philadelphia-based Die-Cast ensemble, has directed four festival productions over the years, including Pericles in 2017.

The Demolition Downtown is about a fascist takeover and the way many might sort of comfortably slide into that, Geffers says. David [Kaplan] chose the play before the pandemic. But its about a couple afraid to leave their house and talking about what food they have left in the freezer, so it became spooky and, after Jan. 6, it seemed even more relevant.

The rarely staged play was published in Esquire magazine in June 1971 as the escalating war in Vietnam divided the nation. As a companion piece, Kaplan directs an outdoor staging of Williamss dark satire The Municipal Abattoir, a short play that Williams worked on through the 1960s. It centers on a government clerk and a state-run slaughterhouse where good citizens, when summoned, go willingly to be killed.

In both plays, the audience has a voyeuristic experience, says Geffers. They are both funny pieces [about] a world that is absurd yet so familiar that we can do nothing else but laugh at it. Its too terrifying to do anything else.

Williamss plays and their popular screen adaptations were often censored, including his first produced play, Battle of Angels. In its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston in 1940, the Boston City Council took umbrage at the story of a charismatic drifter, Val Xavier, whose arrival upends a Mississippi Delta small town and exposes its racism and religious intolerance. According to the festival program, when Margaret Webster, the plays original director, returned to Boston to watch a performance of the censored version, she wrote that she found a castrated and largely incomprehensible edition of the play dying an inevitable death at the Wilbur Theatre.

Not just that, but a conflagration at the end of the play went so awry on opening night they almost burned down the entire theater. The first two rows of the audience had to flee, says Jessica Burr, founder and artistic director of the New York City ensemble Blessed Unrest, which will stage the Battle of Angels, sans pyrotechnics, at Provincetowns Town Hall.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Battle of Angels never made it to Broadway, although 17 years later a different version with a new title, Orpheus Descending, did open in New York. A third retelling was the 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, starring Williams mainstays Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.

Burr sees contemporary parallels in the 1939-set Battle of Angels.

We generally think of community as a good thing but in this case theres a dangerous groupthink that can destroy the individual. Its also an impossible love story between people who refuse to compromise. They are surrounded by these terrified, frightened people who have to destroy it to keep the status quo.

Unlike the original production, Burrs Battle of Angels has a multiracial cast led by Michael Gene Jacobs, a Black actor. Burr says her research indicates that Williams likely wanted Val to be played by a Black man. But in 1940 Williams was 23 years old and a nobody. He could not tell the producers what to do.

Williams was obsessed with the Othello story, says Burr. He studied Shakespeare really closely and he studied his Greeks. [Battle of Angels] is a collision between these very Christian ideals of right and wrong and the Greeks sensibility. Before completing the play, Williams wrote a short story called Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor? Its a strange piece but it led directly into Battle of Angels, she says.

Audiences can see the connection for themselves as the festival will also present a staged reading of Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor? at Fishermen Hall. Adapted by Thomas Owen Mitchell, it is about a Black screenwriter who has a secret affair with a white movie goddess. Williams abandoned the project after writing 75 manuscript pages, likely because he realized that, in 1940, the subject matter would prevent it from being produced as either a play or a film.

PROVINCETOWN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FESTIVAL

At various locations in Provincetown, Sept. 23-26. Schedule and ticket information at http://www.twptown.org

Originally posted here:
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival returns to celebrate works that made the censors sweat - The Boston Globe

You probably saw all the photos of the weekends Met Gala, in which the elites attending the event showed their beautiful faces while the workers serving them were forced to wear masks.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported another similar two-tiered structure for the privileged and those who are beneath them. This one had to do with Facebook and its now-renowned censorship policies.

Simply explained: The underclass are muzzled while the elites speak (or type) freely.

From the WSJ report:

Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The program, known as cross check or XCheck, was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the companys normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are whitelistedrendered immune from enforcement actionswhile others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

The XCheck policy literally says, Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors when enforcing content policy.

Reclaim the Net adds:

This is in marked contrast to how billions of deplorables are being treated on the platform, often falling victim to Facebooks inadequate to say the least automatic moderation, as well as deliberate censorship.

In seeking to illustrate how VIP users are abusing this privilege, the [Wall Street Journal] for some reason chose only examples harmful to one side of the political divide in the US, citing posts containing anti-Clinton, anti-Covid vaccination, etc., content, and even one from former President Trump that are viewed as harmful and would, in any case, be censored had they been posted by regular people.

Facebooks response to the article was that the policy is outdated.

Go here to see the original:
Facebook Censorship Limited to the Internet Underclass National Legal And Policy Center - National Legal and Policy Center

Two 2021 graphic novels, Red Lines by Cherian George and Sonny Liew (MIT Press) and Orwell by Pierre ... [+] Christin and Sebastien Verdier (Self Made Hero) both address issues of censorship and free speech.

Fake news, gag rules, NDAs. cancel culture, government crackdowns, algorithmic deceptions: Its as though we live in a world that took George Orwells 1948 classic 1984 as an instruction manual for controlling thought and expression. But because people on all sides feel that they, and only they, are the victims of this chill, its difficult to find a contemporary analysis of censorship and free speech that does not resort to partisanship and finger-pointing. Now two works of graphic nonfiction released in the last month take on this challenge from two different directions, each with great success.

Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship by Cherian George and Sonny Liew, ... [+] published August, 2021 by MIT Press.

Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship by two Singaporeans, Cherian George and Sonny Liew (MIT Press, August, 2021), takes the direct approach. This is a scholarly and systematic look at efforts to suppress political speech in the form of cartoons, drawings and comic strips historically and globally.

As the book lays out in great detail, cartoons have a unique power to get under the skins of authorities, hypocrites and stuffed shirts in all times and all cultures. Because cartoons are so informal and approachable, efforts to censor them appear especially humorless and heavy-handed, which can redound to the benefit of satirists and provoke a public outcry against the oppressors.

Consequently, the efforts to stifle this kind of speech have grown both sophisticated (through invisible means of influence applied to publishers, distributors and consumers of the content) and coarse (violence, repression, and mass murder in the case of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo). Red Lines offers vivid examples from around the world indicating the many ways governments, religious authorities, economic interests and others conspire to stifle dissent and silence cartoonists.

The authors, accustomed to the chilly attitude of their home country of Singapore toward speech that violates the consensus promulgated by the government, view censorship as anything that impedes the free expression of the artists ideas, not just official action. They present examples of subtle intimidation by authorities, commercial censorship (cartoons whisked out of sight by media companies), censorship by technology (either through bloodless algorithms or opaque and unappealable platform policies), the well-meaning censorship of online mobs out to suppress problematic expression, and outright violence and intimidation, among others.

Red Lines s not exactly a graphic novel, although there are sections that are done in comics style. It is more of an extensively illustrated textbook, full of word balloons and narrative blocks, charts, clip art, Fumetti-style photo-collages and other graphic elements along with sequential art. Both authors seem comfortable working in this visual format; the two previously collaborated on the award-winning, best selling graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and Liew has worked at the highest levels of the American comics business.

All of visual design helps, at least partially, to decompress what is a very dense and academic work (it clocks in at 448 pages). It also carries the point across in ways that plain text could not. Red Lines might not be beach reading, but it surely belongs on the syllabus of any media studies class as it sets the standard for discussion of this topic.

Orwell, a graphic novel biography of the famed novelist, by Chrstin and Verdier, published by Self ... [+] Made Hero, July 2021

Orwell, a graphic biography of the famed British author by writer Pierre Christin and artist Sbastian Verdier (English edition from Self Made Hero, July, 2021, following a 2019 French release from Dargaud) arrives at largely the same place but takes a completely different path. Orwell famously predicted a world where censorship was so ingrained in the fabric of government and society that any form of critical thinking was viewed as a crime by the totalitarian regime. It is thanks to him that we have the colorful vocabulary for describing modern censorship and the manipulation of perception: Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, two-minutes hate, and many others.

If history has flattened Orwell into this collection of his greatest hits, Orwell seeks to reclaim the legacy of the man through a gripping narrative of his life story. Christin and Verdier explore how Orwell, born Eric Blair, synthesized a range of influences and experiences from his upbringing in the twilight years of the British empire, into the clear-eyed perspective on the dangers of totalitarianism that he exhibited in his masterworks Animal Farm and 1984.

Orwells unusual variety of life experiences, from being the clever poor boy in his elite British prep school to a low-level colonial authority in Burma to a destitute vagabond throughout the 20s, helped shape a worldview that was able to step outside the frames of class and ideology typical of the era. The final step in his education was his traumatic tenure as a foreign fighter in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, where he took up arms to defend the left wing Spanish state from a fascist rebellion led by Francisco Franco. Orwell himself survived the experience but his idealism perished on the battlefield; from then on, he recognized that ideologies that elevated abstract theory over ordinary human experience could only lead to oppression, no matter how lofty their stated goals.

For someone as disdainful of comics as Orwell apparently was (he wrote critically about Superman and the superhero genre in the 1930s), he is extremely well-served by the medium in this book. Verdiers black and white artwork is gorgeously detailed where it needs to be, while telling the story without much fuss and frill. It is especially good at evoking the atmosphere of pre-war Britain and the various physical environments.

Orwell avoids emphasizing its subjects most famous work; 1984 literally does not appear until the next-to-last page, with an extended quote to give the flavor of the book. However the final section, After Orwell, provides broader context and some incidental overlap with Red Lines in its description of how factions have appropriated some of his passion and critique in service of illiberal agendas stemming from various points on the political compass.

For Orwell, dystopia was a world in which words and meaning have parted company, whether through the explicit work of censors or through the insidious processes of self-censorship, euphemism and intimidation. As Orwell and Red Lines make clear, the courage to stand up to those forces is as necessary today as it was in 1948.

Read more from the original source:
Two New Works Tackle Censorship And The Power Of Speech - Forbes