Planned Parenthood's copyright infringing tweet is also tone deaf.

If you've been halfway awake the past week or so you've heard about some exposé-style videos with Planned Parenthood associates discussing costs associated with fetal tissue acquisition. The Center for Medical Progress was behind these videos that were released in both edited and un-edited versions. Context or no, some notable quotes have been used in stories, like one from President of Planned Parenthood's medical director council Mary Gatter, who said "Let me just figure out what others are getting," (in terms of price) "and if this is in the ballpark, then it's fine, if it's still low, then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini." She also continues by "offering to use a 'less crunchy (abortion) technique' to get more intact body parts.

Now, the pro-choice argument is the whole thing's taken out of context and blown out of proportion, those "anti-choice," knuckle draggers are trying to tell us what to do with our wombs, they want us to go back to the alley for our abortions, and charging for fetal tissue transportation is the normal cost of doing business. Nothing to see here, move along.

If you happen to be pro-life, it's obviously a different story and confirms everything you suspected about where your tax dollars are going, and just how callous and grisly the people who work for an abortion factory are, as they sit there, turning body parts they've long since justified aren't human, into cold hard cash.

What's more interesting to me isn't the politics, or the never-ending rabbit hole debate on your personal beliefs, but the above tweet from Planned Parenthood, which contains an embedded mic drop gif from Minions.

Planned Parenthood is in the news for some pretty appalling sounding things. Whether you justify them or believe them or not doesn't matter. They sound pretty fucking horrific. Those sound bites coming from workers are so egregious in tone, Planned Parenthood apologized on behalf of of the person who said them. In the realm of PR and 24 hour news, this is a Big Deal™.

So it's interesting to me the giant fuck-you PR tactic they took this morning on Twitter. They didn't just to call a group of pro-life taxpayers and the candidates they support "Minions," but they may also have infringed on copyright by posting a cavalier gif-from a children's movie. We are talking Inception-layers of tone-deaf stupidity here. The creators of the Despicable Me franchise, Illumination Entertainment, is owned by Universal Studios. The same studio who, in a bit of a head shaker, just filed a DMCA notice on behalf of its own company for "pirating," Jurassic World. Think about it, if Universal is so quick to file a DMCA takedown notice on their intellectual property, how do you think they'll feel about an abortion organization posting gifs of its own movies to taunt people who were probably going to take their children to see the same movie?

Will Universal get involved? Will there be a boycott of Minions and the franchise by the pro-choice groups? Will Planned Parenthood fire its community manager after a "sorry if anyone was offended," non apology? Or will they double down and make a gif of Disney's Cinderella getting a safe and legal abortion? Place your bets, folks.

Update The original tweet https://twitter.com/PPact/status/624579796153040896 has been removed but it has also been archived here https://archive.is/6LIDm

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Anonymouso's picture

"If you happen to be pro-life, it's obviously a different story and confirms everything you suspected about where your tax dollars are going, and just how callous and grisly the people who work for an abortion factory are, as they sit there, turning body parts they've long since justified aren't human, into cold hard cash."

In other words, if you already believed all of this was happening beforehand, they edited a video that conforms to your worldview.

If you take the time to actually see what they're claiming and compare it to the evidence they have you'll realize they hold add much water as 9/11 truthers or Donald Trump and his army of birthers.

I'm honestly not sure where the butt hurt over PP telling it's supporters to keep fighting is coming from, but I'm also not a raving party loyalist.

kidsleepy's picture

The "butt hurt," to use your homophobic slur, is coming from the fact they used a gif of an upcoming child's movie without permission to take their moral stand. It's copyright infringement. It says so, right in my headline.

Dabitch's picture

Hi Anonymouso, and welcome. Protip: don't come armed with assumptions here.

In Sweden, where I am, the country where US children's TV host and actress had to fly to in 1962 in order to get an abortion which wasn't legal in the US at the time, this current Planned Parenthood organ harvesting news has shocked people here too. Nobody in Sweden follows a "US party line", I can assure you. ('cuz we're Sweden, duh)

However, in Adland ®, the land where advertising is King, no matter where we live and work in the world, pretty much everyone I work with agreed that using a children's movie (without securing the rights to use the characters!) to do a social media neener during a massive outraged media storm over the aforementioned videos was not only tone-deaf, but incredibly crass.

Your opinion may differ, but it's not "butt hurt" to see that it's an unwise move in such a storm.