Senate Committee To Probe Twitter’s Treatment Of Anti-Abortion Movie ‘Unplanned’ by Joseph Curl for The Gateway Pundit
Sen. Ted Cruz has announced that a committee he chairs will hold a hearing to investigate whether Twitter and other social media are seeking to censor conservative speech — and one prime topic of conversation in the hearing will be the anti-abortion film “Unplanned.”
The film, which was released March 29, takes a critical look at Planned Parenthood. “As one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the nation, Abby Johnson was involved in upwards of 22,000 abortions and counseled countless women on their reproductive choices,” movie review site Rotten Tomatoes says in a brief description of the film. “Her passion surrounding a woman’s right to choose led her to become a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, fighting to enact legislation for the cause she so deeply believed in. Until the day she saw something that changed everything.”
Shortly before the movie came out, Twitter briefly suspended its page.
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Still waiting for an explanation as to why @Twitter inexplicably suspended our account. I think we all know why. Perhaps it’s because we are moving the needle, making a difference and changing hearts and minds with #UnPlannedMovie@LiveAction https://t.co/RvobjpflcF
— UnplannedMovie (@UnplannedMovie) March 30, 2019
“According to Twitter, Unplanned was not suspended on purpose, but rather was linked to another account that had violated Twitter’s rules,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. The account was restored.
Cruz said the hearing before the Judicial Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution will be held on Wednesday and has been titled “Stifling Free Speech: Technology Censorship and the Public Discourse. “Insiders say executives from Twitter, Facebook and Google have been asked to testify, as has Chuck Konzelman, the co-writer and co-director of Unplanned,” the Reporter wrote.
When it comes to Unplanned, “The ridicule of the mainstream media and Hollywood is to be expected,” Cruz told The Hollywood Reporter. “But big tech’s attempted censorship of (Johnson’s) story during it’s opening weekend is deeply troubling and revealing. I have repeatedly asked tech companies for basic data on how many voices on their social platforms are silenced and to what extent it is politically targeted. I intend to keep asking these questions, and hold them accountable.”
As far as I’m concerned, it’s part of a systematic bias against conservative media,” added Konzelman. “We were on Twitter for nine months and an error occurred on opening weekend? That’s not much fun. It’s the film’s theatrical debut. Couldn’t they check their facts a little bit?”
Despite huge forces aligned against it, “Unplanned” pulled in big money in its opening weekend. The picture hauled in $6.1 million from 1,059 theaters, the Reporter wrote. That’s a bit more than the movie cost to make — just $6 million. And “Unplanned” pulled in an average of $5,770 per theater, topping “Captain Marvel” by about $650 per screen, Box Office Mojo reported. For the record, the latest super-hero movie cost nearly $150 million to make.
