‘Unplanned’ director tells Senate panel about censorship by tech giants

Chuck Konzelman, director and writer for the pro-life film ‘Unplanned,” which tells the pro-life conversion story of former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson, spoke at a Senate hearing hosted by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) titled, “Stifling Free Speech: Technology Censorship and the Public Discourse.” Konzelman explained to the a panel how the film’s Twitter account was shut down on the film’s opening weekend. After a large outcry, the account was restored, and Twitter claimed that the page had been suspended by mistake. But users noticed that the follower count on the page had plummeted, with some finding that they had been removed as followers and could not follow the account again. This, too, Twitter said, was a result of the accidental suspension.
According to Life Site News, Konzelman told the panel, “If [tech giants and media] are allowed to apply their own broadly drawn ‘guidelines’ to dismiss one side of controversial issues – the side they don’t agree with — and do so with impunity? Then they will do so. In a digital age, exclusion from the digital arena isn’t just discriminatory – it’s the most insidiously effective form of censorship imaginable.”
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