Instagram and Facebook have been hiding abortion posts
In the wake of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and placing the right to accessing an abortion in jeopardy, Instagram has been hiding posts that mention abortion from public view and, in some cases, asking viewers to verify their age in some cases to make posts visible.
Several Instagram accounts run by abortion rights advocacy groups have found their posts and stories hidden with warnings that describe them as “sensitive content”.
Bleu Grano, who runs the account Fund Aborition Not Police, found that a post containing a guide to abortion services - including how to obtain abortion pills through the mail - had been removed for violating the platform’s community guidelines on the “sale of illegal or regulated goods”.
“I got really stressed that they were going to suspend the account,” Grano told Wired. “I started to think it was specific to abortion, and stopped using the word ‘pills’ and only said ‘abortion by mail’.”
A educaitonal post Bleu Grano, who runs the account Fund Abortion Not Police, shared on Instagram was removed for violating certain policies amid growing crackdowns on posts mentioning abortion. Image: Bleu Grano
Motherboard also found that posts like Grano’s were being restricted by Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram) for violating policies that restrict the sale of illegal or controlled substances on the platforms.
On June 27, NBC reported that Meta was restricting search results for the terms “abortion” and “mifepristine”, one of two drugs commonly used to induce a medical aboriton.
These reports have led to speculation that the company had changed its policies since the Supreme Court decision - though Meta has denied making any changes.
However, pro-choice advocates have said this censorship isn’t new, telling Wired that the company’s AI moderation system has been seen tagging abortion content, oftentimes about abortion pills, as “sensitive”, decreasing its visibility, or removing the content altogether.
“We have been seeing social media platforms, specifically Meta, suppressing abortion content for quite a while now,” Jessica Ensley, the digital outreach and opposition research director at Reproaction, a nonprofit that supports access to abortion, told the outlet.
A volunteer moderator for a large Facebook group for American women seeking abortion information and support said recent content removals were “totally precedented”, with posts about abortion pills being removed by Facebook for years.
“What’s wild is that you don’t know where the line is,” she said. “Every single post has to be seen by a moderator, because we don’t want people posting requests for pills, to request or to send pills, because that will get the entire group taken down.”
In comparison, a similar group she moderates on Reddit also has rules about not selling or buying rules on the platform. But, sharing content and links discussing the pills aren’t removed by the platform or put the group at risk of being shut down.
Posts containing information about accessing abortion, like this one shared on Power To Decide’s Abortion Finder page, are being labelled as ‘sensitive content’ by the platform. Images: Power To Decide
Though censoring this kind of content doesn’t seem to be a new issue, the platforms have only come under scrutiny for hiding this content but not others in the weeks since the Supreme Court decision.
The Associated Press recently identified nearly a dozen posts mentioning the word “abortion” which were covered up by Instagram, while an earlier report found that both platforms were deleting posts that offered to mail out abotion pills in states where their use was restricted.
The platforms said the posts were being deleted because they violated policies relating to the sale or gifting of certain products, including pharmaceuticals, drugs, and firearms.
But, the AP reported finding that similar posts offering to send guns or marijuan through the mail weren’t removed by Facebook, which is yet to respond to questions about the discrepancy.
Images: Supplied