The True Test for Meta: Pro-Lifers Want Their Suspended Facebook Accounts Back

After eight years of trying to extirpate free speech on its platform with the help of fact checkers, Meta — parent company of and Instagram, inter alia — would like you to know that it’s going to take a different tack going forward.

All right, two prominent pro-lifers say: Will you unban our accounts?

In a letter from the Alliance Defending Freedom sent to the social media giant on behalf of two individuals and a major pro-life outlet, lawyers demanded Meta “immediately” take action on accounts it disabled through bans.

The move, first reported by the Daily Wire, comes as Meta impresario Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of fact-checking agreements on his company’s platforms earlier this week, promising to replace them with a “community notes” system similar to X’s.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said.

“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S. So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.”

That sounds great — and it’s clear that, after almost a decade of chasing “fake news” in the wake of Trump’s first electoral victory, there really wasn’t a major issue with it on the platform to begin with, not to the extent that fact-checking partners were needed.

However, the move drew the immediate attention of the ADF, which represents anti-abortion outlet LifeNews, its founder Steven Ertelt, and pro-life mother Abby Covington — all of whom had their accounts affected in one way or another by censorship policies on and Instagram.

“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” the letter, reported on by the Daily Wire on Thursday, read.

Two videos are at the center of the controversies that led to the accounts of three entities — LifeNews, Ertelt, and Covington — being suspended.

The first was a May video from Ertelt, which showed a doctor performing a Caesarian section birth. In the video, the hand of the baby grabbed the finger of a delivering doctor.

The point was quite obvious as it relates to abortion up to the point of birth: “An unborn baby can’t be just a clump of cells when he or she is grabbing the doctor’s hand,” a caption on the video read.

However, Ertelt’s account was permanently disabled thanks to what described as “child sexual exploitation” (?!), and since LifeNews’ Instagram account is linked to Ertelt’s one, that basically got disabled, as well. Nice work keeping that fake news at bay, Meta!

“These account suspensions have caused serious harm to Mr. Ertelt and LifeNews,” ADF attorneys wrote in the letter.

Covington’s suspension was even more spurious, given the details from the Daily Wire.

“Covington, the Christian pro-life mother of three, had her account permanently suspended after she posted about her family’s adoption journey. In her post, she described her family’s Christian faith and encouraged expecting mothers to reach out if they were thinking about putting their baby up for adoption,” the outlet’s Mairead Elordi wrote.

“We believe children are a gift from the Lord,” she said in the post. “God has given us the desire to support an expecting mother who will choose life for her baby through the gift of adoption! We love our children, and our prayer is to expand our family while providing a safe & loving home.”

After receiving the usual fusillade of hateful responses (“I’m adopted and I’d s*** in your mouth out of spite while you were asleep if I’d been raised that way,” one response read), she was then informed that her account had breached the company’s rules on “human exploitation,” according to her attorneys.

Again, this affected her Instagram accounts, including one that she used for her small business selling skincare items and jewelry.

The ADF called on Meta to respond to its request by Jan. 22.

“These situations provide a litmus test for whether Meta will live up to its public announcement or continue to censor and restrict the marketplace of ideas,” the lawyers wrote.

And that’s the key here: Facebook’s crackdown on free speech hasn’t just been at the hands of fact checkers, although they’ve played a huge role in deciding what views get amplified and what don’t. There’s also bonkers applications of the company’s deliberately ambiguous set of community standards that just so happen to seem to be used on one side of the political aisle.

Remember, this isn’t the only ridiculous application of standards that got highlighted in the wake of Meta’s capitulation this week. The Babylon Bee, for instance, posted 12 times that their satire got fact-checked (anyone remember the threatened demonetization of the conservative joke outlet over the article “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication”?).

1. CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication

This was fact-checked by Snopes, and threatened us with suppression and demonetization for sharing false information. A classic. pic.twitter.com/9ZK0DAloYb

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 8, 2025

And then, on the other hand, there was the invariable groaning from Meta’s usual allies on the left.

The fact checkers themselves said that the cutoff of the relationship (and the funding it came with, one assumes) constitutes an existential crisis. The New York Times, meanwhile, played true to form by essentially calling the idea that fact checkers could censor content on Meta a form of fake news, relying upon — naturally — the fact checkers themselves.

In other words, there are serious problems here that aren’t just going to go because Mark Zuckerberg decided to throw the other side of the sociopolitical aisle a bone. If you want to see how truly committed he and Meta is to free speech, keep a close eye on what happens to LifeNews, Ertelt, and Covington.

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