Is Instagram censoring abortion rights accounts?

As Trump rolls back the Civil Rights era, corporate America is on shaky ground

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

I was working on a big news roundup today when a few big stories began to break and I began to look into what seemed to be a very clear throttling of an important abortion medication organization. Lo and behold, tonight we have a story that assesses what increasingly feels like the original flavor of fascism taking root in DC and Silicon Valley.

It’s frustrating, in a way, because there are so many things to cover at the state and local level, where we can make a real difference. But in the opening days of Trump administration, the smug weasel Nazis and Neanderthals now in power are making decisions that have already set us back more than 60 years, and it’s important to both understand the roots of what they’re doing and call out the quiet collaboration being carried out by corporate America — one of the main topics of tonight’s newsletter.

We’ll have the news roundup tomorrow, but here’s one nice bulletin for you during these bleak times: the Colorado Worker Protection Act, which would finally eliminate the state’s most draconian anti-union law, made it over a key first hurdle by passing through committee in the state Senate on Tuesday. This would be a huge win for working people across Colorado, and it needs all the momentum it can get due to Gov. Jared Polis’s early skepticism.

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Many posts on the Instagram account for the nonprofit abortion rights group Aid Access are unreadable tonight, reducing the public’s access to the largest supplier of abortion medication in the United States.

More specifically, the organization’s posts about how to obtain abortion pills are now broken, stripped of their images and the information they provide. More generic posts about holidays remain. When I reached out to Meta’s press office seeking clarification, I was told that the blurring and blocking is the result of an error that the company’s engineers were working to fix. They had no answer as to why the specific images were removed.

The broken posts were called out by Jessica Valenti, a reproductive rights journalist, at around 4:45pm. I emailed Meta around 7:15 and heard back two hours later. It’s now just past midnight and the posts are still down.

This was the second time within three days that Instagram has been accused of censorship against liberal content. On Tuesday, users posted screenshots of Instagram stating that it had hidden search results for words like “Democrats.” Meta also blamed those incidents on a technical error.

There is a particular wariness around Meta at the moment due to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s diligent new pursuit of a relationship with President Donald Trump and other far-right figures.

Zuckerberg’s wooing has involved a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, attendance at the event on Monday, and a new dedication to “free speech,” including the abandonment of content moderation on Meta’s major platforms, Facebook and Instagram. The policy was announced earlier this month when Zuckerberg was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and ushered in with new rules allowing transphobia and racial slurs.

A new generation of collaborators

Meta also ended its DEI program last week after spending several years pushing corporate inclusion. Trump this week has signed several executive orders that effectively banish equal opportunity efforts from the federal government, labeling them discriminatory in the bizarro logic that the right has injected into the public sphere over the past decade.

It’s fair to admit that DEI programs were often co-opted by corporations to give the impression that they cared about anything other than profit. And the language they used was an easy target in a culture designed to attack people who offer inconvenient solutions. But they are nothing like how the unhinged right describes them. Here’s what Andrew Ferguson, the new chair of the FTC (and thus somebody who really should have no opinions on DEI), wrote to his staff today:

DEI is a scourge on our institutions. It denies to all Americans the Constitution’s promise of equality before the law. It divides people into castes on the basis of immutable characteristics, and treats them as caste members rather than as individuals. It stokes tensions by elevating race and other immutable characteristics above merit and excellence. It promotes invidious discrimination. And it violates federal and natural law.

If you want to know whether somebody is actually just racist, look for the term "natural law.”

Most notably, Trump officially revoked Executive Order 11246, the landmark order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson that prohibited federal contractors from “discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.”

According to a document sent to me by the office of Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking minority leader of the House education and labor committee, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance has obtained over $260 million for over 250,900 employees and job seekers who were discriminated against by federal contractors discrimination.

Repealing the Civil Rights era was the ultimate end goal of the anti-DEI movement, and tonight, the Justice Department announced that it is pausing all civil rights-related cases. That means freezing active investigations into accusations of public and private discrimination and not bringing prosecutions against even the most obvious offenders.

It’s a far-right fantasy come to life, owed to the diligence of far-right provocateur Chris Rufo, a pseudo-intellectual who has been open about his desire to overturn liberal society. I’ve written in depth about that fraud over the years, and his tweets offer a good view into the myopia of the right-wing victim complex.

Rufo’s hyperbolic pseudo-intellectualism gave the right the language and pretense to begin their assault on diversity and trans people, which has largely been the theme of Trump’s first few days in office. He is taking aim at the most vulnerable: obliterating attempts to diminish the impact of systemic racism, pushing trans people back into the closet based on nothing but the ideology of cruelty, and redefining what it is to be an American.

Redefining freedoms, silencing dissent

One of the reasons why the Instagram “errors” are disconcerting is that it’s becoming clear that the federal government under Donald Trump is going to be aggressively vicious, thus making private suppression of speech all the more dangerous.

In addition to banning DEI, the government has set up a tip line for federal employees to snitch on colleague who they suspect of defying Trump’s orders. This is happening alongside a ramp up in the administration’s loyalty checks of nonpartisan civil servants, which will be accompanied by attacks on their unions.

Already, Twitter has been weaponized by Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most annoying man, who turned into a breeding ground for the worst kinds of lonely bigots and snake oil freaks. Links are throttled, disinformation flourishes, and it is almost impossible to follow news on the site, tearing away one of the most important platforms for real-time updates and accountability.

The media is also experiencing warped priorities and desecration of the truth. Pointing out the incontrovertible fact that Musk gave a Nazi salute at the inauguration is already getting journalists fired, and Jeff Bezos is lending the Washington Post’s remaining credibility to the idea that President Biden’s admittedly stupid preemptive pardons of his family members are in league with Trump’s decision to pardon 1500 insurrectionists, including white nationalists and violent criminals.

(On that note, here’s my interview with Dakota Adams, the estranged son of newly freed Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes. More to come on this.)

Ideally, we’d stop relying on the few corporate social media platforms, but their monopolies mean that breaking free and while still managing mass communication in an increasingly atomized society is going to be very difficult. We relied on corporate benevolence, and our misconception of the free market, for far too long. Taking an oppositional approach instead of cheering on performative businesses, and calling them out any time they throttle the free speech of activists, is the first small step.

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