Access to information is vital in the fight to protect reproductive rights. Women, girls, and people who can become pregnant must be able to access trustworthy and medically accurate information about reproductive healthcare when they seek it out online.
However, in the United States access to information about reproductive health and rights is limited, and it is increasingly censored by social media companies. Even before the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped away federal abortion protections, social media companies had begun to censor reproductive rights-related content on their platforms. Now platforms are censoring even more content from activists and organizations that share information about medication abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
Everyone deserves access to critical information about reproductive health and rights, including information about medication abortion, and social media companies should be facilitating – not limiting – that access.
Amnesty International USA calls on social media companies to facilitate, not censor, access to reproductive rights information. Amnesty works with nonprofits and companies that have been censored on social media for sharing content related to reproductive health and rights to understand the type of content that is censored, discuss the challenges and negative impacts stemming from content suppression, and work in coalition to develop advocacy strategies on this issue.
Amnesty and its coalition partners demand answers from social media companies regarding their inconsistent enforcement of community guidelines, which has led to the suppression of abortion-related content. Amnesty wants to ensure that free discussion of reproductive health and rights online is protected, and that accurate reproductive healthcare information is accessible on social media.
