This article has been changed since its original publication.
Live Action, the pro-life organization at the forefront of exposing abortion conglomerate Planned Parenthood, has reportedly been banned from the social media platform TikTok for “violating community guidelines.”
According to Live Action founder Lila Rose, the organization had amassed over 21,000 followers on TikTok by the time of the ban over a video that shared personal stories of women who chose life over abortion.
“TikTok has just BANNED & permanently removed Live Action from the platform,” Rose said on Twitter. “My team grew the largest pro-life voice on the platform We had 21,000 followers & over a million video views This is another egregious attack on the pro-life movement by pro-abortion Big Tech.”
“TikTok has a larger active user base than: Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit,” she continued. “With 800 million active users. Just shy of Instagram’s 1 billion active users. It is a crucial platform to spread our life-saving message on.”
This is the video that TikTok says violated their “Community Guidelines” and banned us for.
In it, we share the beautiful personal stories that some of our followers have shared with us about choosing life for their babies. pic.twitter.com/EBADFmxUEW
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) January 31, 2020
To illustrate the platform’s hypocrisy, Rose shared a rather disturbing video that supposedly did not violate TikTok’s community guidelines; in it, a student slaps a mock baby fetus to demonstrate a “DIY abortion.”
“The platform BANNED Live Action’s educational content, yet regularly permits videos that simulate brutal harm to preborn infants. This video has 1.2 MILLION watches,” said Rose.
This is a sample of the positive, life-affirming content Live Action was sharing on the platform. pic.twitter.com/LLhiF9Gmw0
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) January 31, 2020
“This is blatant viewpoint discrimination and an egregious attempt to silence pro-life voices. TikTok must immediately reinstate our account in full and allow all voices on the platform,” she concluded.
In an official statement released at the time of the ban, Rose said that TikTok completely banned Live Action from the platform within a half-hour of removing the video that supposedly violated “community guidelines.”
“Live Action’s videos shared baby photos and videos and highlighted the illogic of the pro-abortion movement,” Rose said in a statement. “At the same time, TikTok allows pro-abortion accounts and videos to remain on the platform, videos like this that simulate brutal harm to preborn or born infants. Live Action appealed TikTok’s decision to remove one of our videos and within a half-hour our account was completely removed on the platform. No more account, no more videos. This is blatant viewpoint discrimination and an egregious attempt to silence pro-life voices. TikTok should reinstate our account in full and allow all voices on the platform.”
As noted by LifeSiteNews, TikTok has a history of censoring political content for reasons far more arbitrary than Twitter or Facebook, such as when it “temporarily suspended 17-year-old Feroza Aziz over a video discussing the Chinese government’s persecution of the country’s Uighur Muslim population.”
“TikTok reinstated her account and claimed she had been suspended over a different video (featuring a tasteless joke about Osama bin Laden), but the incident was enough to inspire Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to ask the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review the company’s conduct,” noted LifeSite.
The social media platform has faced severe scrutiny in recent days after the U.S. Army banned soldiers from using the popular Chinese app, determining it to be a cybersecurity threat.
“It is considered a cyber threat,” Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa said of the situation. “We do not allow it on government phones.”
UPDATE: Shortly after the publication of this article, TikTok reinstated Live Action’s account and apologized for “human error.”
BREAKING: @tiktok_us has just unbanned our account after apologizing for what they call "human error."
They admitted our account “is not in violation of any of our Community Guidelines."
We demand assurance this will never happen again to us or anyone in the pro-life movement. pic.twitter.com/vvRwZiDIAS
— Live Action (@LiveAction) January 31, 2020
