Curated from Deeplinks — Here’s what matters right now:
This is the tenth and final installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. When we launched Stop Censoring Abortion, our goals were to understand how social media platforms were silencing abortion-related content, gather data and lift up stories of censorship, and hold social media companies accountable for the harm they have caused to the reproductive rights movement. Thanks to nearly 100 submissions from educators, advocates, clinics, researchers, and individuals around the world, we confirmed what many already suspected: this speech is being removed, restricted, and silenced by platforms at an alarming rate. Together, our findings paint a clear picture of censorship in action: platforms’ moderation systems are not only broken, but are actively harming those seeking and sharing vital reproductive health information. Here are the key lessons from this campaign: what we uncovered, how platforms can do better, and why pushing back against this censorship matters more now than ever. Lessons Learned Across our submissions, we saw systemic over-enforcement, vague and convoluted policies, arbitrary takedowns, sudden account bans, and ignored appeals. And in almost every case we reviewed, the posts and accounts in question did not violate any of the platform’s stated rules. The most common reason Meta gave for removing abortion-related content was that it violated policies on Restricted Goods and Services, which prohibit any “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift or ask for pharmaceutical drugs.” But most of the content submitted simply provided factual, educational information that clearly did not violate those rules. As we saw in the M+A Hotline’s case, this kind of misclassification deprives patients, advocates, and researchers of reliable information, and chills those trying to provide accurate and life-saving reproductive health resources. In one submission, we even saw posts sharing educational abortion resources get flagged under the “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” policy, a rule intended to prevent terrorism and criminal activity. We’ve seen this policy cause problems in the past, but in the reproductive health space, treating legal and accurate information as violent or unlawful only adds needless stigma and confusion. Meta’s convoluted advertising policies add another layer of harm. There are specific, additional rules users must navigate to post paid content about abortion. While many of these rules still contain exceptions for purely educational content, Meta is vague about how and when those exceptions apply. And ads that seem like they should have been allowed were frequently flagged under rules about “prescription drugs” or “social issues.” This patchwork of unclear policies forces users to second-guess what content they can post or promote for fear of losing access to their networks. In another troubling trend, many of our submitters r
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Original reporting: Deeplinks