A number of Instagram posts by Aid Access, an online abortion services provider, appeared blurred out or refused to load this week, raising concerns about the availability of reproductive health information in the wake of content moderation changes by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. 

Jessica Valenti, the journalist behind the popular “Abortion Every Day” newsletter, brought attention to the missing posts Wednesday. Dozens of users confirmed the Aid Access posts were unavailable to them on their own devices, with many receiving a “Couldn’t load image” error message when trying to view individual posts.

On Thursday, some of Aid Access’s posts were restored and others were taken down entirely. A spokesperson for Meta told The New York TImes that some removals of content about medication abortion were “overenforcement.” Neither Aid Access nor Meta returned requests from The 19th for comment.

President Donald Trump was sworn into office Monday in front of a row of America’s tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta. Over the past few weeks, Zuckerberg has made moves largely interpreted as an appeal to Trump: visiting the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort; removing fact checkers from his products in favor of community notes; and talking about “restoring free expression on our platforms,” which is seen as a response to persistent claims of bias against conservative voices. The company also dramatically rolled back its hate-speech moderation policy, allowing users to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill and unfit for military service. 

Social media is a vital source of information for women and LGBTQ+ people, and users are raising concerns about how changes on huge platforms like Meta’s will impact the availability of accurate medical information online. 

Reproductive health advocates, though, say they have dealt with suppression on social media for years. In a survey of organizers fielded in 2022, the reproductive justice nonprofit Reproaction found that 38 percent of respondents had posts taken down because Meta “bans the sale or use of unsafe substances.” As part of the Repro Uncensored coalition, Reproaction has helped identify content removal, account suspensions and advertising restrictions as the main struggles these types of groups face online.

“There isn’t a progressive organization that hasn’t had some problems with social media platforms, either removing their content, falsely flagging their content, or being given sort of the runaround by tech support,” said Jessica Ensley, senior vice president of outreach at Reproaction. 

She underscored that the challenges of using social media to talk about abortion is not new. “As long as these social media platforms have begun, we have been pushing to share accurate information on abortion care and make a difference,” Ensley said.

Many of the posts taken down by Meta share information about medication abortion, a safe two-drug regiment that can be completed at home, or specifics about how to use mifepristone or misoprostol. Aid Access connects with people seeking abortions through telemedicine, and prescriptions are fulfilled by a pharmacy in the United States. 

Reproaction’s first campaign against a social media platform was in 2018. During her ultimately successful campaign for a Senate seat, Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn ran an ad on Twitter that misleadingly claimed she “stopped the sale of baby body parts” at Planned Parenthood, a reference to fetal tissue used for research. After initially taking down the ad, the company reversed course and eventually apologized for the removal. Reproaction objected, gathering more than 2,000 signatures on  a petition demanding Twitter comply with its own policy, which prohibits ads with misleading or deceptive claims.

The playing field for ads, which are more strictly regulated, has always been uneven. Every one of the women’s health organizations interviewed by the Center for Intimacy Justice for its 2022 report on sexual health discrimination said their ads for products related to topics like menopause or pelvic floor pain had been rejected by Meta due to sexual connotation. But the tech giant had no issue with erectile dysfunction medication ads claiming “Harder erections = better sex,” Jackie Rotman, founder and CEO of the Center for Intimacy Justice, said in an email.

After the Center for Intimacy Justice’s report was covered in outlets including The New York Times, Meta changed its policies about what types of ads were allowed. “Yet in practice in its enforcement, Meta still systemically rejects information about these topics and more – misclassifying them as ‘Adult,’” Rotman said.

Rotman said many reproductive health organizations, including Aid Access, have attempted to post ads related to abortion information on Facebook or Instagram only to have them rejected by Meta. “In our research, we have seen Meta cite its ‘Social Issues, Elections or Politics’ flags, or for ads that attempt to share up-to-date information about how to access abortion pills in the United States, Meta has asserted that a number of these ads violate Meta’s Advertising Guidelines regarding ‘Unsafe Substances,’” she wrote.

“Instagram’s systemic digital suppression of information about reproductive health poses major barriers to accessing accurate and reliable information.”

The posts removed this week from Aid Access were not ads, but standard feed posts.

This past December, Reproaction was notified that a post made earlier in the year on their company Facebook and Instagram pages was taken down. The posts said “Abortion is and forever will be unstoppable” alongside a link to learn more about self-managed abortion. Meta said the posts “may buy, sell or exchange drugs that require a prescription from a doctor or a pharmacist” in violation of community standards.  As a consequence, Reproaction’s account was “restricted as a safety measure” from hosting live videos or posting ads for a month. They appealed the decision on January 7 and were denied the same day.

“We take our wins when we can,” Ensley remarked. And when they don’t win, “we go back to the drawing board to fight another day.”