Reports have surfaced about the removal of information about abortion from social media. Unfortunately, none of it is unprecedented. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have long maintained broad and vague community standards that allows them to remove content with little recourse.
What Is Happening
As reported by Vice and followed up on by Wired, posts about abortion receive intense scrutiny online. The difference, one activist told Vice, is simply that more people are seeing their posts removed than before.
Vice found that the truthful sentence “abortion pills can be mailed” triggered a flag as violating Facebook’s rules about “buying, selling, or exchanging non-medical drugs.” A moderator running a group on Facebook connecting people seeking information about abortions told Wired she has always had to carefully monitor posts to avoid the group being removed entirely, with clear rules about what can be posted—any links are banned, for instance.
The moderator expressed a frustration we’ve heard constantly about community guidelines: that they have no idea what the lines actually are and find things suddenly shifting with no warning.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms tightened up enforcement of rules surrounding medical information, making their automated systems and human reviewers arbiters of truth. Their rules also ban the buying, selling, or gifting of pharmaceuticals (it’s this rule that the posts with the sentence “abortion pills can be mailed” ran afoul of).
Furthermore, during the pandemic, Facebook removed posts at the request of states’ attorneys general related to the “promotion and sale of regulated goods and services.” In the context of abortion care and information, that precedent becomes especially dangerous.
Additionally, pretty much all social media platforms have some form of rule banning either “illegal” activity or the promotion thereof. What is unclear is, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, if those rules will now apply on
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