by Sera Golding-Young

My wife and I have made music together for the past 8 years, in an independent band named Unsung Lilly. We are passionate about creating epic, empowering pop music.

As a same-sex couple, we have been heartened recently by the improved representation of LGBTQ people on television, and we are grateful that most people we meet are accepting of our relationship. It’s enough to make you think that maybe society has fully accepted that ‘love is love.’
Unfortunately, our recent experience with Facebook suggests otherwise. When Facebook’s platform refused to allow us to fully express ourselves as both artists and a same-sex couple, it brought back painful memories of discrimination against the LGBTQ community.

Like all musicians, COVID hit us hard. We lost all our income, and because we were in the United States on work visas, we were unable to claim unemployment benefits without risking our visas.

We were in a difficult spot, and we turned to our community on Facebook for help. We asked our fans to join our Patreon community and go behind the scenes of the creation of our new album, in the hopes that their support would keep us afloat in these unprecedented times.

We posted a video on Facebook, announcing our new album and encouraging fans to join our Patreon page. We made it a sponsored ad so we could reach as many of our fans as possible.

The ad, unfortunately, was rejected. While this happens sometimes, I couldn’t believe it when I saw the reason: Facebook had labeled our video as containing “adult sexually explicit content.”

Assuming there must have been a mistake, we sought multiple appeals and resubmitted the ad several times, but each time received the same rejection message.

We wracked our brains wondering what could be sexually explicit about our video…and then realized that it might be the image of us early in the video. It’s a romantic image of us with our foreheads touching. We use the image for all our profile photos across all platforms because we believe it’s a beautiful artistic shot of two people in love. You can watch the video here.

When we talked about what happened on our social pages, many of our friends and fans shared our outrage. Some people even came up with possible explanations for why the ad was rejected. These ideas included theories such as “Facebook doesn’t allow intimacy of any kind in their advertisements, it would have been the same with a hetero couple,” and “what about the nature of some of the dancing shown later in the video.” We wanted to understand why our ad was rejected. So, we ran a test. We posted another ad with the exact same video and copy, but we changed the photo of us to a ‘nonromantic’ photo. The ad was approved.

Next, we tried the same video and copy but replaced the photo of us with a picture of a heterosexual couple in the same romantic pose.

Guess what? The ad with the heterosexual couple was approved too.

The ACLU helped us contact Facebook. The company claimed the ads were rejected ‘incorrectly’ and assured us that the rejection had nothing to do with the LGBTQ content, but rather the dancing in the video. They would not explain why the ad with the exact same dancing but with a heterosexual couple was accepted in our tests.

If Facebook is restricting LGBTQ content because Facebook’s systems consider our kind of love to be “adult” and “sexually explicit”, that means they are actively erasing the LGBTQ experience and silencing LGBTQ voices.

As members of the LGBTQ community, we know how important it is to see ourselves represented and reflected in the media. Visibility can save lives, particularly for transgender people, LGBTQ people of color, and youth.

Women are often over-sexualized, and female couples even more so. Two women in love, gently resting their foreheads together is romantic—not sexual. By rejecting images like this, Facebook is reinforcing the hyper-sexualization of women and female couples.

When we spoke on social media about our experience, other LGBTQ people shared similar stories of being censored by Facebook. These are not isolated incidents. In fact, we learned that Facebook has a history of censoring LGBTQ advertisers. And Facebook’s problems are not limited to the LGBTQ community, Black creators documenting police violence have recently seen their pages temporarily taken down completely. Facebook calls these “mistakes” but isn’t doing enough to stop them from happening again.

Facebook is a platform that claims to connect people, so why does their platform silence LGBTQ voices and prevent them from connecting with their communities? Facebook has a responsibility to represent everyone in a fair and just manner. That means addressing how the LGBTQ community can feel at home on Facebook when the platform appears to discriminate against members of our community for showing who we are.

Today we join the ACLU of Northern California in calling on Facebook to take the following steps:

1. Audit Facebook’s Community Standards and Advertising Policies. 
   Facebook should commit to an audit of its community standards and advertising policies, looking specifically at whether standards for “adult” content disproportionately remove content of women and same-sex couples.
    
2. Real Removal Transparency. 
   Facebook’s message about our ad violating the rules was confusing and unhelpful, which prompted us to design a test to determine what happened. Facebook should tell all users exactly what about their content purportedly broke the rules.
    
3. Meaningful review of a contested removal. 
   We were privileged to have contacts at the ACLU who could reach out to Facebook on our behalf, but that shouldn’t be necessary. Facebook should commit to ensuring that appeals are taken seriously, carefully considered, and communicated effectively to users.

by Brigitte Amiri

Deputy Director

Last week, a hideous allegation emerged in a complaint filed on behalf of immigrants detained at the privately operated Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia. In the complaint, nurse Dawn Wooten blew the whistle on “jarring medical neglect” she says she learned about while working at the facility, including an allegation that a government-contracted doctor repeatedly performed sterilizing procedures on women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody without their knowledge or consent.
 
These allegations have an eerie familiarity: the U.S. has a long history of forcibly sterilizing Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. And the whistleblower complaint raises the concern that reproductive abuse is not just a part of our country’s past.
 
The issues are not limited to the allegations at the ICDC. The Trump administration’s hostility toward the reproductive freedom of immigrants in its custody has long been evident. In 2017, groups working with young immigrants discovered that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which has custody over immigrants under age 18 who come to the country without parents, had instituted a policy of blocking pregnant young people from accessing abortion care and trying to coerce them to carry pregnancies to term against their will.
 
After learning of that anti-abortion policy, we sued on behalf of Jane Doe, a then 17-year-old Central American immigrant. Jane found out she was pregnant after being placed in a government-funded shelter, and immediately asked for an abortion. Federal officials responded by ordering the shelter to block her access to abortion care and forcing her to receive counseling at a religiously affiliated “crisis pregnancy center.”
 
Jane took the administration to court, fighting back to protect not only her own right to reproductive freedom, but the rights of a class of hundreds of other young immigrants like her who were also subject to the ORR’s anti-abortion policy. As a result of a protracted legal battle that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, Jane was able to receive the care she needed, and won a court order blocking ORR from obstructing all pregnant immigrant minors in its custody from making their own decisions about their bodies and their lives.
 
But the hostility against immigrants’ reproductive autonomy continued. In 2018, the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era policy that presumed pregnant people should not be detained. Now, ICE is making opaque, “case-by-case” decisions about whether a pregnant woman should be caged. In 2019, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center filed a series of administrative complaints to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) based on interviews with more than 100 people soon after their release from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including Border Patrol, custody. One pregnant woman said she was repeatedly slammed against a chain link fence by a Border Patrol agent. Another said she experienced a miscarriage while detained in a Border Patrol facility for 12 days, but did not receive any hygienic products or medical care.
 
Numerous pregnant women detained by Border Patrol recounted being told by officers to get abortions, all while being held in crowded, unsanitary facilities with little access to food or water. Medical attention for these women was often delayed or denied, all while they endured verbal abuse. This neglect and mistreatment has devastating results: During the first two years of the Trump administration, the number of undocumented women who miscarried while in government detention nearly doubled.
 
In February 2019, a 24-year-old Honduran woman went into premature labor and delivered a stillborn child four days after being detained by ICE. This spring, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Jewish Family Service of San Diego filed a complaint to the DHS OIG on behalf of a pregnant woman who was forced to deliver a child in a Border Patrol hielera while standing and still wearing pants, after Border Patrol agents repeatedly denied her requests for medical attention. And these cases only represent the experiences of immigrants in detention that have thus far come to light.
 
The evidence is clear: Immigrants are routinely abused, silenced, traumatized, and even killed by the U.S. immigration detention system, and it has to stop. Irwin Detention Center must be shut down. And to protect all immigrants and the reproductive freedom of those in detention, we must defund ICE and CBP, dismantle the cruel immigrant detention system, and ensure that everyone has the ability to make their own reproductive health care decisions.

by David Cole

ACLU Legal Director

With the exception of Thurgood Marshall, no Supreme Court justice did more to realize the Constitution’s promise of “equal protection of the law” than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday. Where Marshall, as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow segregation, Ginsburg, as the first director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, persuaded the Supreme Court that women and men, long treated differently under the law, must be accepted as equals.

Neither acted alone; they carried the torches of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, respectively. Their courtroom arguments were buoyed by broader political currents. But both achieved far-reaching, historic changes in constitutional law. And both did it incrementally, through careful, painstaking work, aimed at appealing to those not already with them. As Ginsburg said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

In the last years of her life, Ginsburg became an unlikely celebrity. RBG T-shirts, mugs, earrings, bobblehead dolls, workout gear, and books all became best-sellers. In 2018, both a documentary, RBG, and a Hollywood feature film, On the Basis of Sex, appeared, to popular and critical acclaim. Chief Justice John Roberts quipped, at the unveiling of a portrait of Ginsburg, that his children asked him why he, too, didn’t have a rapper’s moniker. She deserved every bit of the praise. One of only nine women in a class of about five hundred at Harvard Law School, she broke many barriers, and her work made it possible for young women today to take for granted that they cannot be denied admission, jobs, or other benefits simply because of their sex. That’s radical.

Note: This piece was first published in the New York Review of Books on September 20, 2020