Twitter blocked a Senate campaign ad for Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Monday over her comment in the ad that she “fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of unborn baby body parts.”
The Associated Press reports that “Twitter found that statement to be inflammatory and ‘likely to evoke a strong negative reaction.’” A Twitter representative reportedly told Blackburn’s vendors that they “would be allowed to run the rest of the video if the flagged statement is omitted.”
This means that the Blackburn campaign can’t pay to promote the video on Twitter, but it can still be linked to from YouTube and other media platforms.
That’s just what Blackburn did, tweeting to her followers that Twitter “shut down our video ad, claiming it's "inflammatory" & "negative." Join me in standing up to Silicon Valley ? RETWEET our message!”
.@Twitter shut down our video ad, claiming it's "inflammatory" & "negative." Join me in standing up to Silicon Valley ? RETWEET our message! pic.twitter.com/K3w4AMgW6i
— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) October 9, 2017
The reference to stopping “the sale of unborn baby body parts" is likely a reference to Blackburn’s time as chairwoman of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives.
The congressional investigative panel was called for following the release of undercover videos by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) in summer of 2015 which appeared to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the harvesting of unborn baby parts for profit. When the videos were initially released in 2015, even Hillary Clinton called the footage “disturbing.”
Following the release of the videos and just after the Congressional panel was formed, Planned Parenthood announced that it would no longer take reimbursements for fetal tissue donations.
The pro-life organization Live Action ran into similar problems with Twitter in June and were told, in order to be allowed to advertise, they had to “delete all tweets related to: the group’s undercover investigations; the Center for Medical Progress undercover investigations; images and videos of abortion procedures, including but not limited to late-term abortions; content related to defunding Planned Parenthood, including petitions; ultrasound images; and any links to sections of the Live Action website containing videos with any of the above content.”