Republican congressional candidate and U.S. Air Force veteran Anna Paulina Luna says censorship on Facebook-owned Instagram has hampered her campaign’s ability to collect donations.
In comments to Breitbart News, Paulina Luna, who is seeking the Republican nomination in FL-13, said her donation URL had been deactivated 14 times as of September 23. The congressional candidate provided video recordings of Instagram displaying error messages when users attempt to click on the donation link.
“I have been in correspondence with Facebook and they are having their engineers currently look into the problem,” said Paulina Luna. “However, they deactivated my links after every major radio segment I have done with national audiences and it has resulted in what I am going to estimate tens of thousands of dollars in loss campaign donations.”
“I am not an independently wealthy candidate so I depend largely on my social media platforms to raise money for my campaign.” Paulina Luna said that after initially promising the company’s engineers would look into the problem, Facebook has yet to provide her with any updates.
Instagram has increasingly come under fire from conservatives and Trump supporters over cases of censorship and “errors” that appear to only affect one side of the political aisle. In February, Breitbart News exclusively reported that followers of the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said they had been unfollowed from his account without their knowledge.
Instagram also deleted a post from Don Jr. about hate crime hoaxster Jussie Smollett, in what the tech platform claimed was an “error.” More recently, Don Jr reported that both himself and President Trump were not appearing in Instagram search suggestions, another “error” the company says it has now fixed.
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Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.