Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years.
The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of more than 50 organisations worldwide, some serving tens of thousands of people – in what appears to be a growing push by Meta to limit reproductive health and queer content across its platforms. Many of these were from Europe and the UK, however the bans also affected groups serving women in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year.
Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.
Campaigners say the actions indicate that Meta is taking its Trump-era approach to women’s health and LGBTQ+ issues global. Earlier this year, it appeared to “shadow-ban” or remove the accounts of organisations on Instagram or Facebook helping Americans to find abortion pills. Shadow-banning is when a social media platform severely restricts the visibility of a user’s content without telling the user.
In this latest purge, it blocked abortion hotlines in countries where abortion is legal, banned queer and sex-positive accounts in Europe, and removed posts with even non-explicit, cartoon depictions of nudity.
“Within this last year, especially since the new US presidency, we have seen a definite increase in accounts being taken down – not only in the US, but also worldwide as a ripple effect,” said Martha Dimitratou, executive director of Repro Uncensored.
“This has been, to my knowledge, at least one of the biggest waves of censorship we are seeing,” she said.
Campaigners have accused Meta of being condescending and unresponsive, with the company offering only vague reasons why certain accounts were taken down – and appearing unwilling to engage.
In one email shared with the Guardian, a Meta consultant appears to invite a number of reproductive health organisations to a closed-door online briefing about “the challenges that you are facing with Meta’s content moderation policies”.
The email says the meeting “will not be an opportunity to raise critiques of Meta’s practices or to offer recommendations for policy changes”.
Dimitratou said such closed-door meetings had happened before, saying they “reinforce the power imbalance that allows big tech to decide whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced”.
In another instance, a Meta employee counselled an affected organisation in a personal message to simply move away from the platform entirely and start a mailing list, saying that bans were likely to continue. Meta said it did not send this message.
Meta’s recent takedowns are part of a broader pattern of the company purging accounts, and then – at times – appearing to backtrack after public pressure, said Carolina Are, a fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens.
“It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if platforms’ appeals actually worked, but they don’t. And appeals are the basis of any democratic justice system,” she added.
Meta said that it aimed to reduce enforcement mistakes against accounts on its platform, but added that the appeals process for banned accounts had become frustratingly slow.
Organisations affected by the bans include Netherlands-registered Women Help Women, a nonprofit offering information about abortion to women worldwide, including in Brazil, the Philippines and Poland. It fields about 150,000 emails from women each year, said its executive director, Kinga Jelinska.
Women Help Women has been on Facebook for 11 years, said Jelinska, and while its account had been suspended before, this was the first time it was banned outright. The ban could be “life-threatening”, she said, pushing some women towards dangerous, less reliable information sources. Little explanation was given for the ban.
A message from Meta to the group dated 13 November said its page “does not follow our Community Standards on prescription drugs”, adding: “We know this is disappointing, but we want to keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone.”
“It’s a very laconic explanation, a feeling of opacity,” Jelinska said. “They just removed it. That’s it. We don’t even know which post it was about.”
Meta said more than half of the accounts flagged by Repro Uncensored have been reinstated, including Women Help Women which it said was taken down in error. “The disabled accounts were correctly removed for violating a variety of our policies including our Human Exploitation policy,” it added.
Jacarandas was founded by a group of young feminists when abortion was decriminalised in Colombia in 2022, to advise women and girls on how to get a free, legal abortion. The group’s executive director, Viviana Monsalve, said its WhatsApp helpline had been blocked then reinstated three times since October. The WhatsApp account is currently banned and Monsalve said they had received little information from Meta about whether this would continue.
“We wrote [Meta] an email and said, ‘hey, we are a feminist organisation. We work in abortion. Abortion is allowed in Colombia up to 24 weeks. It’s allowed to give information about it,’” said Monsalve.
Without Meta’s cooperation, Monsalve said it was difficult to plan for the future. “You are not sure if [a ban] will happen tomorrow or after tomorrow, because they didn’t answer anything.”
Meta said: “Our policies and enforcement regarding abortion medication-related content have not changed: we allow posts and ads promoting healthcare services like abortion, as well as discussion and debate around them, as long as they follow our policies.”
While groups such as Jacarandas and Women Help Women had their accounts removed outright, other groups said that they increasingly faced Meta restricting their posts and shadow-banning their content.
Fatma Ibrahim, the director of the Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based platform which offers Arabic-language content on sexual and reproductive health, said that the organisation had received a message almost every week from Meta over the past year saying that its page “didn’t follow the rules” and would not be suggested to other people, based on posts related to sexuality and sexual health.
Two weeks ago, these messages escalated to a warning, in which Meta noted its new policies on nudity and removed a post from the Sex Talk Arabic’s page. The offending post was an artistic depiction of a naked couple, obscured by hearts.
Ibrahim said the warning was “condescending”, and that Meta’s moderation was US-centric and lacked context.
“Despite the profits they make from our region, they don’t invest enough to understand the social issues women fight against and why we use social media platforms for such fights,” she said.
