TikTok Silences Women Warning Against Horrific Side Effects of ‘Birth Control’

Communist Chinese government-tied TikTok censored videos of women exposing the health risks of hormonal contraceptives after apparently receiving pressure from a leftist legacy media outlet. The Washington Post released a now-infamous report attempting to discredit women speaking out about many of the well-known side effects listed on the blanket-sized warning label that comes with oral contraceptives. In its report, The Post highlighted the fact that TikTok had censored some of the people it had reached out to for the piece, including The Daily Wire commentator Brett Cooper who hosts The Comments Section and TikTok influencer Nicole Bendayan. The newspaper took credit for the part it played in the removal of multiple videos. The Post identified one censored video as being a clip from Cooper’s May 2023 appearance on the Iced Coffee Hour podcast. In the censored video, Cooper highlighted contraception’s worrying impact on weight gain, fertility, regular hormone function and romantic attraction. The Post itself reported on the Pill users’ increased risk for cervical cancer in 1977, something it neglected to remind users of in its more recent reporting on the issue. The clip of Cooper garnered 219,000 likes “before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry,” The Post reported. Links to the TikTok video now bring up the message, “Video currently unavailable” or “This page isn’t available.” The app does not provide any further explanation. Cooper posted on X (formerly Twitter) on March 24, “What’s ironic is that [The Post] reached out to me for a comment, and they asked WHY my video was removed and no longer available. Shocker... was because of them.” She included a screenshot of The Post’s admission about the censorship following a Post inquiry. The Post bragged that TikTok removed five videos critical of contraception after the leftist legacy outlet demanded to know how the app “prevents the spread of misinformation.” A TikTok spokesperson claimed to the Post that the videos had “inaccurate, misleading or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society.” TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from MRC Free Speech America at the time of publication. Another individual that TikTok censored was Nicole Bendayan, whose video explaining why she got off contraception went viral until censorship silenced it, according to The Post. TikTok has a track record of anti-American bias and censorship and is currently in danger of being banned due to congressional legislation. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) owns a board seat and maintains a financial stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. Censorship occurring after leftist media outlets or researchers put pressure on Big Tech appears to be a rising trend, something addressed in a recent "60 Minutes" segment. The Post’s whole piece aggressively defended contraception, bewailed the fact that some women are turning away from it, and blamed “right-wing” so=-called “misinformation” for that. “Search for ‘birth control’ on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear,” The Post bemoaned. “Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.” Such evidence used to be mainstream. In fact, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents substantial evidence of serious side effects from taking hormonal “birth control”, including some of the very effects The Post scoffs at. The study published on NIH also listed serious potential long-term side effects from contraception including cancer, multiple sclerosis, weight gain and suicidal desires.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact TikTok via email at communitymanager@tiktok.com and demand Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

More Election Interference? Google Drops Elections-Focused Announcement in Europe

Google doubled down on its election-related censorship operations just after MRC released a special report on Google’s election interference efforts over the past 16 years.  MRC Free Speech America released a report finding 41 examples of Google’s election interference efforts between 2008 and 2024. And yet, Google is going full speed ahead with its election efforts in Europe. Google announced its efforts to control information through partnerships with so-called fact-checkers and media literacy organizations in a blog post on Thursday.  “Today, we’re excited to announce a €1.5 million contribution to the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), a newly created association representing European fact checking organizations, to launch Elections24Check,” wrote Google. The Elections24Check project, according to Google, is “working together to fact check the European Parliamentary Elections” through a database of articles “fact-checking,” “debunking” and “prebunking” claims made by European political candidates.  The database “will offer an early detection system of online misinformation for the entire continent,” claimed Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, Chair of the EFCSN Governance Body. He added that it will cover the EU and neighboring countries, emphasizing that “misinformation travels widely across borders especially around the upcoming elections.” Cracking down on alleged “misinformation” is a euphemism that leftists have used worldwide to silence their political opposition online. Google once again emphasized its so-called pre-bunking and media literacy efforts, which it claims “teaches audiences how to spot common manipulation techniques, so they can better recognize mis- and disinformation online.” Google added that “[t]he campaign, which kicks off this spring, will focus on techniques used to advance disinformation including decontextualization, scapegoating and discrediting … .”  A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Rob Roos told MRC Free Speech America that this push to censor and control so-called “misinformation” is not coming out of nowhere. “With the Digital Services Act, the European Union is forcing big social media platforms to ‘fight misinformation’ online,” he said. “But who decides what is misinformation and what isn't? In a democracy, it is essential that ideas can be discussed freely.” Roos, who also serves as Vice President of the think tank founded by Margaret Thatcher, the New Direction Foundation, aptly added that in many cases, anti-free speech laws are only a piece of the equation. “Even without the DSA, most Big Tech companies have proved to be eager to engage in censorship and in tampering with the algorithm to decrease the reach of conservatives,” the MEP said. “This is blatant corporate election interference, and this interference poses the true danger to democracy.” Although these so-called fact checkers have every right to express what they claim to be true, Google has long elevated fact checks that are often biased against conservative ideas. The company openly admitted this in a December 2019 blog post. “Google has highlighted fact checks in Search and News for almost three years as a way to help people make more informed judgments about the content they encounter online,” the company wrote. “Fact checks from authoritative sources are highlighted on Google Search and are labeled in Google News.” This comes just after Google pumped the brakes on its AI chatbot Gemini’s willingness to answer election-related questions. “Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses,” Google told CNBC on March 12. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Bozell: Google’s Election Interference Is ‘Deliberate,’ and ‘They’re Getting Away with It’

MRC President Brent Bozell went on Rich Valdés’s show America at Night to discuss MRC’s groundbreaking report exposing Google’s election interference efforts over the last 16 years. MRC researchers documented 41 examples revealing Google’s election interference efforts between 2008 and 2024 to benefit the most liberal candidates, including former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden. “We found it over and over and over again. This is deliberate,” Bozell told Valdés. “These people do not care about the rule of law.”  Read the Special Report Here: 41 Times Google Has Interfered in US Elections Since 2008 The pair discussed the report in detail noting that Google suspended the accounts of bloggers who supported then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. Again in 2012, inconsistent with its stated policy, Google refused to resolve a search engine manipulation prank that smeared then-leading Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. The company has also been shown to favor its candidate of choice in its search results, autofill options and its Google News and AI chatbot results.  Bozell specifically drew attention to a 2022 MRC Free Speech America report that showed how Google search results buried the campaign websites of 10 of 12 Republican Senate candidates in highly competitive races. He also noted that Google Search results have censored “every candidate except for Joe Biden a total of 112 times.” As he pointed out the interference, has the potential to cause election-altering damage to candidates’ campaigns.  “Surveys are now showing that up to five percent of the American people make their decision on of  who to vote for based on a Google search,” Bozell said. “So when you are one of those five percent and you don’t even see a Republican – less than one percent go past page one – then that five percent is being pushed right into the Democratic camp.” The MRC president accused Google of making undisclosed contributions through the technological advantages it offers certain candidates. “One could argue – and I would definitely argue – that these constitute illegal campaign contributions because a corporation is not allowed to make a campaign contribution to a federal campaign,” Bozell said. “So indeed these are deliberate blatant attempts to put the thumb down on the election process in the United States.” He went on to shred Google and the double standard set out for similar tech companies that make such contributions. “If you had a government that truly wanted to uphold the rule of law, where you have campaign contribution laws on the books, where if your radio station gave money to Donald Trump, it would be breaking the law,” he said. “And yet Google is deliberately participating in this by doing the kind of censorship they’re doing, which is a campaign activity, and they’re getting away with it.” You can read more of in the Special Report below: https://cdn.mrc.org/static/pdfuploads/MRC%20Google%20Election%20Interference%20Report.pdf-1710439680476.pdfConservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Dear Anti-Free Speech Bureaucrats, Rep. Hageman Would Like a Word: MRC UnCensored

Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) conveyed to MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider her plans to protect free speech on the latest episode of MRC Uncensored. Hageman and Schneider discussed the congresswoman’s new bill empowering Americans to hold government officials accountable when their First Amendment rights are infringed upon. “[O]ur government has been weaponized against us. And one of the most obvious examples of that is the attack on the First Amendment,” she told Schneider. Hageman’s new bill, the Censorship Accountability Act, would allow citizens to sue federal executive branch employees personally when they take actions that encroach upon American liberties. She outlined how much the First Amendment has been trampled on in recent years, explaining: “All of the things that we’re seeing is a government that has determined that our ability to exercise our First Amendment rights – specifically our freedom of speech and the free exercise clause, our freedom of religion – is something that the government has been targeting. But there has been no mechanism by which we have a private class of action to hold the people doing this accountable.” Schneider noted that Hageman’s bill is based on U.S. Code 42 Section 1983, which allows citizens to take civil action against state and local officials when deprived of their rights. Hageman’s new bill intends to help citizens hold government employees on the federal level personally liable when they censor Americans. The Wyoming lawmaker gave the examples of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – whose agency set up the Disinformation Governance Board and was found to be funding censorship – and Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit for the Internal Revenue Service, who was accused of unfairly granting tax-exempt status to various organizations and targeting conservative groups. “Mayorkas is acting fully within the scope of his employment but he is doing something illegal under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” she denounced. “Right now I have no mechanism to hold him accountable for that.” She added that if her bill passes “then I could sue him, we, the people who were targeted by Lois Lerner, they could have sued her individually. They could have sued her personally and not only received damages and an injunction but also attorney’s fees.” Schneider added, “We have seen it over and over and over where federal employees have initiated grant programs to silence us, created artificial intelligence to silence us, calling us domestic terrorists to try and stop us under anti-terrorism statutes.” He then pointed out that Hageman’s bill would not only incentivize good behavior from top officials but also from rank-and-file executive branch employees who are often asked to do the heavy lifting. “This legislation will empower those lower-level, mid-level employees to be able to say to their bosses, to the cabinet secretaries and others, ‘I cannot do this. I cannot do what you are asking me to do. I cannot take this action that will deprive somebody of their constitutional rights because I might get sued.’” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.