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Catherine Salgado
Catherine Salgado is a Staff Writer with Media Research Center’s NewsBusters’ Free Speech America. She also has a column, Washington’s Bayonette, on The Rogue Review and her own SubStack newsletter, Pro Deo et Libertate. Catherine previously wrote for The National Pulse and is a graduate of Christendom College with a degree in Classical Languages and Theology. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from The Rogue Review.
Twitter’s Community Notes slapped a “Context” warning label on an actual photograph of a miscarried unborn baby, trying unscientifically and inaccurately to claim that the depicted embryo was not seven weeks old.
When pro-life organization Live Action tweeted out photos and an article about 7- and 8-week-old unborn babies, with the back stories of the two tiny humans (Riley and Annabelle), Twitter’s Community Notes users attempted to discredit the photos.
Live Action President and Founder Lila Rose responded to the dubious context label on June 12, stating in a tweet, “Twitter posts a blatantly false ‘correction’ on our tweet showing a 7-week-old embryo from fertilization, who had been miscarried. What’s going on, @elonmusk?” The Community Notes “context,” shown in Rose’s screenshot, appears to have been removed since.
“This just goes to show the problem with so-called fact-checks, and ultimately the problem with Twitter’s Community Notes,” MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris said. “As columnist David Marcus pointed out in a recent piece, ‘“Community Notes” are a crowdsourced alternative to professional fact-checking, and while some conservatives appear to like the results better, the warning labels are still a form of censorship, albeit by a different name.’ Marcus is absolutely right.”
Live Action tweeted on June 9, “This is what a ‘clump of cells’ looks like 7-weeks after fertilization.” The tweet included two photos of an unborn baby at seven weeks, to demonstrate how human the baby looks, even though it is about the size of a blueberry.
Live Action added another tweet with an article about the baby pictured, a little boy who sadly died in a miscarriage. His mother shared photos of the two babies she miscarried in hopes the photos would open eyes on how babies are clearly humans, only a few weeks into gestation, according to the Live Action article.
In other words, the attempted discredit was foolish. Community Notes laughably tried “to debunk an actual (accurate) photograph with an artist’s depiction” of an unborn baby, according to The Babylon Bee Managing Editor and author Joel Berry.
The unscientific Community Notes claimed, according to a screengrab shared by Rose, “This is not how an embryo looks like at 7 weeks. The embryo is about 1 cm long from head to tail — about the size of a coffee bean And it looks more like this.” The Twitter Community Note included a link which, as reported above by Berry, contained an artistic rendering of an embryo rather than a photograph as Live Action provided.
