Twitter Reverses Ban On Blackburn Senate Ad

BRENTWOOD, TN — U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn's Senate campaign announcement ad will get to run uncut on Twitter after all, as the social-media service reversed its decision about what it originally deemed "inflammatory."

Initially, Twitter blocked the campaign video, saying that a statement about "baby body parts" is inflammatory and violates its terms of use. Among the claims the Williamson County Republican makes in the video is that she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”

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In a statement to The Hill, Twitter confirmed it reversed that ban amid an uproar, stoked by the campaign itself, which urged supporters to share YouTube links to the video on Twitter, which were not blocked.

"Our ads policies strive to balance protecting our users from potentially distressing content while allowing our advertisers to communicate their messages. Nowhere is this more difficult than in the realm of political advertising and the highly charged issues that are often addressed therein. After further review, we have made the decision to allow the content in question from Rep. Blackburn’s campaign ad to be promoted on our ads platform," the company said.

The ban, however short-lived, may ultimately be a boon to Blackburn, largely regarded as the favorite to win the Republican nomination to succeed retiring Sen. Bob Corker. She already used the ban in a fundraising push.

“I’m being censored for telling the truth. When I talked about our legislative accomplishments to stop the sale of baby body parts, they responded by calling our ad ‘inflammatory’ and ‘negative,'” she wrote in a fundraising, though, again, the video was not broadly censored, just banned from Twitter's ads platform.

Following the release of a controversial video by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, Blackburn chaired a House committee that investigated whether Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers profited illegally from the sale of fetal tissue, in contravention of a 1993 federal law which bans the practice, though it allows for "reasonable" payments related to shipping and packaging of the tissue.

Prosecutors in a dozen states investigated the claims of illegal sales and none brought charges against Planned Parenthood. A Texas grand jury indicted the activists who made the video for tampering with a government record with the intent defraud. Those charges were later dropped because the indictments were likely illegal under Texas law.

Photo via United States House of Representatives