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April 22, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Video platform Vimeo has deleted the account of the American Family Association (AFA), characterizing the pro-family organization as a hate group.

According to a report by OneNewsNow.com, which is affiliated with AFA, “Vimeo told the American Family Association (AFA) it will not host an account if the owner is a member of a terror or hate group.”

“In recent weeks they’ve taken action against our account,” AFA president Walker Wildmon recounted. “They’ve officially shut down American Family Association’s video account with no in-depth explanation and no recourse, no way to defend our credibility.”

“Vimeo’s done great harm to American Family Association by limiting our free speech and basically targeting us based on our religious beliefs,” he added.

Vimeo’s actions, Wildmon explained, were “based on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s reckless labeling of AFA.” The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center had categorized AFA as a hate group.

The summary of AFA’s mission provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center on its website is rather harmless. The group “says it promotes ‘traditional moral values’ in media. A large part of that work involves ‘combating the homosexual agenda’ through various means, including publicizing companies that have pro-gay policies and organizing boycotts against them.”

AFA, on its own website, says “[t]he mission of American Family Association is to inform, equip, and activate individuals to strengthen the moral foundations of American culture and give aid to the church here and abroad in its task of fulfilling the Great Commission.”

Ed Vitagliano, executive vice president of AFA, said, “Vimeo has essentially characterized the Christian faith as ‘hateful’ because the Bible teaches that sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful. Yes, that includes homosexual activity.”

“This has been Christian teaching for 2,000 years,” he pointed out. “Vimeo’s religious bigotry is appalling, and we reject the company’s heavy-handed censorship.”

Vimeo is not the only large company basing its decisions on campaigns of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

TELL VIMEO: Stop silencing conservatives and Christians! Sign the petition here.

“Amazon has excluded SPLC-accused ‘hate groups’ from its charity platform,” PJ Media wrote. “Apple has partnered with the SPLC in fighting ‘hate.’ Hyatt Hotels has blacklisted SPLC-accused ‘hate groups,’ as has the event-hosting platform Eventbrite.”

In 2019, major newspapers, including The New York Times, “repeated SPLC talking points and successfully pressured Mar-a-Lago to cancel a gala with the conservative group ACT for America.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, one of the co-founders of the SPLC accused the group of merely “ripping off” its wealthy donors for decades.

Morris Dees asked, “Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out?”

Several major social media platforms have used their position of power to censor positions they disagree with.

On Monday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he considers protests against regional stay-at-home orders, which are frequently planned via Facebook, to be “harmful misinformation” that must be deleted.

“But, you know, more than normal political discourse, I think a lot of the stuff that people are saying that is false around a health emergency like this can be classified as harmful misinformation that has a risk of leading to imminent physical danger and we’ll just take that kind of content down,” he said.

LifeSiteNews’s own Twitter account was locked after tweeting a link to a piece referring to a transgender activist by his real name, Jonathan Yaniv.

While Twitter didn’t explain which rule the tweet supposedly violated, the social media giant declared earlier last year that “misgendering” someone, which means referring to individuals by their actual sex instead of what they call their “gender identity,” automatically constitutes “hateful conduct.”