By Jane Eklund, Tech and Reproductive Rights Fellow, Amnesty International USA
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade eliminating federal abortion protections and leaving the issue of abortion rights to individual states. During this time, more people than ever turned to the internet for information on abortion.
However, U.S. reproductive health and rights organizations working to ensure access to care and resources online encountered frequent removal of their content on social media platforms. When people needed access to abortion information the most, social media platforms were removing it. Over two years later, this problem persists.
Abortion Content Removals
Instances of abortion content being removed from social media post-Roe often lack adequate justification or appear to result from a misapplication of platform guidelines, the rules platforms develop for the types of content that can be shared. Reproductive health and rights organizations reported that platforms most frequently removed content on medication abortion and how to access it. Organizations are often informed that their content violates policies on “the sale or regulated goods” or “restricted goods,” even though it does not mention selling abortion medications.
Social Media Account Suspensions
While some organizations face issues only with removal of their content, others have had their accounts temporarily suspended for supposedly violating community guidelines, sometimes without being informed of the specific guidelines they violated. The enforcement of community guidelines can appear arbitrary at times, leaving users who post abortion-related information confused by the inconsistency.
Restoring posts or accounts removed from social media platforms can take days or weeks often due to lengthy appeals processes. As social media account owners await determinations from a platform’s content moderators, their content or accounts are not visible to other users. The removal of reproductive health and rights by platforms reduces availability of information on abortion rights, services and access for those seeking it. This content removal disrupts the flow of essential reproductive healthcare information.
Advocacy organizations, telehealth abortion providers, and reproductive health nonprofits have sought greater transparency on how platforms moderate abortion content, but many do not learn why their content has been removed or why their accounts have been temporarily suspended.
Social media companies should not limit users’ ability to access reproductive health content.
Big Tech’s Human Rights Responsibilities
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights underscore the responsibilities of social media companies to neither cause nor contribute to human rights abuses through their activities and to address the impacts in which they are involved. When social media companies fail to uphold these principles, they risk infringing on their users’ rights to access healthcare information, contributing to the threats to reproductive rights, particularly those living where access to reproductive healthcare is restricted.
To ensure that women, girls, and people who can become pregnant can exercise their reproductive rights, they must be able to access evidence-based, non-biased information on abortion.
Recommendations to companies
Social media companies must recognize their impact and take decisive action to uphold human rights in both their policies and practices. To do so, they should:
- Ensure that accurate reproductive health and rights information can be easily accessed and make any necessary changes to their content moderation practices to ensure that such information can be shared.
- Be more transparent about how their community guidelines apply to abortion content.
- Undertake proactive, ongoing human rights due diligence to identify, mitigate, prevent, and address any potential and actual harms arising from their content moderation and potential systematic suppression of abortion-related content.
These steps are essential to ensure greater platform transparency and to keep reproductive health and rights information accessible and publicly available to users.