Scott Tibbs
Twitter creates an impossible standard
By Scott Tibbs, September 11, 2019
When you cannot win an argument, you complain to the administrators to censor your opponent. That is what we are seeing
on Twitter regarding "sensitive media." Twitter automatically hides any media with "graphic violence," including "medical procedures." I assume this is the logic used to hide a photo of an aborted baby I posted, one year after I posted it. The policy is dated March 2019, so was the new standard applied retroactively?
Twitter threatened to mark my account as "sensitive" if I continued to post sensitive media without marking it as sensitive. Almost all media I post is not "sensitive" by any objective standard. It is important to show the brutal reality of abortion but I do not want ALL of my photos marked as "sensitive," because they are not. So like it or not, I am looking at self-censorship to avoid worse censorship from Twitter.
Here is the obvious problem: Twitter does not have the option to marking specific media as sensitive. Gab has this option and it is a full ten years younger than Twitter. There is no reason Twitter should not have this feature. You can either mark all of your media as "sensitive" or none of it.
The obvious stopgap is to link to pages like the Center for BioEthical Reform and Created Equal, which is where I got the image in the first place... at least until Twitter forbids links to those sites with the excuse of "protecting" people from sensitive media.
Graphic images have long been used to document oppression and injustice, from slavery to the Holocaust to Jim Crow, and now with abortion. It was images of the human rights abuses in Yugoslavian civil war that spurred the West into action. But there is no group more oppressed than unborn babies, with fifty million slaughtered just in these United States since 1973. Twitter and Big Tech are censoring factual anti-abortion information in order to shift the debate.
Twitter used to be a "free speech" site, and still pretends to be a platform. But the censorship of pro-life information is an editorial decision, not moderation of content. As we move into 2020, the restrictions will get worse. So do conservatives have a plan for where we will go once we are removed from Big Tech?
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