Republican Candidate’s Ad Again Banned From Social Media and We’re Supposed to Think It Is an Accident

Just a week ago, I posted on how Facebook was blocking a campaign ad by California Republican Elizabeth Heng. She’s an underdog against Democrat Jim Costa in CA-16, but she’s an energetic campaigner, she’s a self-made business woman and she’s got a compelling story: her parents came to California one step ahead of Khmer Rouge death squads, without a penny to their names, and raised three super successful American citizens. This is the ad:

Facebook blocked it because she dared to show pictures of the Communist horror the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia. Facebook tried to frame it as a violation of “community standards,” specifically, ““We don’t allow ads that contain shocking, disrespectful or sensational content, including ads that depict violence or threats of violence.”

.@facebook rejected my video because it was “too shocking” for their platform, referring to the scenes of horrific events my parents survived in Cambodia. Facebook, do you think it’s right to censor history? #censorship
Full ad here: https://t.co/SY0w1o327m pic.twitter.com/etvlZYK22N

— Elizabeth Heng (@ElizabethHeng) August 4, 2018

To buy this you have to suspend a lot of disbelief because it is simply not plausible. I think it is also illegal as broadcasters are forbidden by federal law to alter or censor an ad by a candidate for federal office. It is hard to believe that the same rule doesn’t, by implication, apply to Facebook.

Eventually, Facebook relented…after the primary. Now its idiot cousin Twitter is at it.

.@Jack — Who at Twitter can help me fix this censorship? The Cambodian Genocide is not ‘obscene’. Please don’t make me go through this again like @Facebook. I need to focus on the issues that matter. pic.twitter.com/erYg67a0Ew

— Elizabeth Heng (@ElizabethHeng) August 16, 2018

In the past few weeks Facebook and Twitter have been called out by conservatives for deliberately shutting down conservative voices as evidenced in multiple cases. pic.twitter.com/vcrwHfCGje

— Elizabeth Heng (@ElizabethHeng) August 16, 2018

It was the same ad showing, again, the ultimate price of succumbing to communism:

According to Elizabeth Heng’s campaign, Twitter has determined that the Republican congressional candidate’s video advertisement is “ineligible to participate in the Twitter Ads program at this time based on our Inappropriate Content policy.” The company deemed the video’s content to be in violation of the site’s prohibition on “that which is offensive, vulgar, or obscene.”

The ad contains footage of the Cambodian genocide because Heng’s parents fled to the U.S. from Cambodia to escape communism. When the campaign asked for further explanation about how the video violated Twitter’s policies, Twitter responded with the same message, this time highlighting the word “obscene” in bold. The campaign followed up again but received only a message from the Twitter Ads Support team saying they could “no longer assist or support any further requests.”

After protests, Twitter has eventually relented and allowed the ad to run but without any explanation of why it was banned in the first place.

These decisions are all running in one direction for a reason. It isn’t that Facebook and Twitters SJW censors have never seen news footage of the Cambodian genocide. Of course they have. They are using nebulous, arbitrary, and, in this case, I believe illegal rules to overtly interfere in a federal election campaign.

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