FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 14, 2019
Washington, DC -- Earlier today, Eventbrite, one of the world’s largest event management and ticketing services, made the conscious decision to ban ACT for America from their platform citing verbiage from their community guidelines stating, “We prohibit content or organizations that promote hate towards or the harassment of individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
The claim that ACT for America, the nation’s largest grassroots national security organization in the United States, would promote hate at any of our events is as baseless as it is absurd.
ACT for America has a strict zero-tolerance policy towards discrimination and violence, and our organization proudly consists of over one million members transcending all racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The basis of Eventbrite’s rationale for removing ACT for America rests on the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of our organization as a “hate group”.
The widely-discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has used their status as a long-respected civil rights organization to unfairly target individuals and organizations whose political ideology lean right of center. By labeling organizations they are at political odds with as “hate groups”, the discredited SPLC seeks to delegitimize conservative organizations and undermine their effectiveness.
Had Eventbrite done their research, they would have found that the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center has raised millions of dollars from attacking mainstream conservative organizations like the Family Research Council, PragerU, Turning Point USA, Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Conservative Union, among dozens of others. Ironically enough, one of the main topics of the events in question was the influence of the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center on Tech Companies to de-platform organizations and public figures they arbitrarily deem hateful.
By banning ACT for America from using their platform to manage ticket sales to public educational events nationwide, Eventbrite has become complicit with the radical left’s attack on freedom of speech and demonstrated a complete disregard for their users’ First Amendment rights.
Their decision to ban “hate groups,” in reality is a decision to ban all freedom loving, flag waving conservative Americans from their site. While we have come to expect this from left-wing radicals, we certainly did not expect a prominent event planning platform to weaponize their brand and silence conservative voices.
The First Amendment wasn’t created to protect just leftist speech, it was created to protect ALL speech. We hope that Eventbrite will reverse their decision and issue a public apology. By doing so, they would demonstrate that they value the democratic freedoms on which our nation was founded on instead of falling prey to the fascist tactics of the left. We will continue to fight for the freedom of speech of ALL Americans, it is shameful Eventbrite will not be joining us in this fight.
ACT for America is the nation’s largest national security focused grassroots organization with over 1 million members nationwide and 102 bills passed on the state and federal level. For more information about ACT for America, please visit www.actforamerica.org.