YouTube announced Thursday it would begin removing content containing abortion misinformation and “unsafe abortion methods.”
The move came nearly a month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on June 24.
“Starting today and ramping up over the next few weeks, we will remove content that provides instructions for unsafe abortion methods or promotes false claims about abortion safety under our medical misinformation policies,” the company tweeted.
YouTube announced it will also be providing its users with information about abortion from local health officials and the World Health Organization.
“We’re also launching an information panel that provides viewers with context and information from local and global health authorities under abortion-related videos and above relevant search results,” a follow-up tweet from YouTube said.
“We believe it’s important to connect people to content from authoritative sources regarding health topics, and we continuously review our policies and products as real world events unfold,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told The Daily Signal.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a pro-life group, expressed its support for one aspect of YouTube’s decision in a statement to Fox News Digital, but also cautioned that YouTube must not become an “arbiter of truth” on abortion.
“Videos sharing instructions for dangerous self-managed abortions are deeply concerning and a threat to the health and safety of women as well as their developing child. We are glad YouTube has decided to review this type of content and hope they will take appropriate action,” the statement read.
The statement added, “When it comes to public discourse on issues such as abortion that are far from settled in the minds and hearts of the American people, YouTube and other Silicon Valley giants must not position themselves as the arbiter of truth.”
Kara Frederick, director of the Tech Policy Center at The Heritage Foundation, criticized Google, YouTube’s parent company, for censoring pro-life content while pushing a pro-abortion narrative. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Google has already bent over backward to grant special status to its pro-abortion users by agreeing to delete location history for those visiting abortion clinics,” said Frederick, who previously worked for Facebook and has testified before Congress about holding Big Tech accountable for censorship and gaslighting the American people.
“The new rules are: Discuss alternatives to abortion and you’re banned, but get an illegal abortion, and we’ll scrub the digital evidence,” Frederick told The Daily Signal.
“Big Tech will continue to enforce its two-tiered justice system by offering special treatment to users with a leftist worldview,” she said.
In May, following the leak of a draft opinion but before the official overturning of Roe v. Wade, a group of Democrat lawmakers along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai calling on the company to stop collecting and retaining “unnecessary” location data on its users.
“We write to urge you to stop unnecessarily collecting and retaining customer location data, to prevent that information from being used by right-wing prosecutors to identify people who have obtained abortions,” the letter read.
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