Curated from Deeplinks — Here’s what matters right now:
This is the ninth installment in a blog series documenting EFF’s findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. Meta has been getting content moderation wrong for years, like most platforms that host user-generated content. Sometimes it’s a result of deliberate design choices—privacy rollbacks, opaque policies, features that prioritize growth over safety—made even when the company knows that those choices could negatively impact users. Other times, it’s simply the inevitable outcome of trying to govern billions of posts with a mix of algorithms and overstretched human reviewers. Importantly, users shouldn’t have to worry about their posts being deleted or their accounts getting banned when they share factual health information that doesn’t violate the platforms' policies. But knowing more about what the algorithmic moderation is likely to flag can help you to avoid its mistakes. We analyzed the roughly one-hundred survey submissions we received from social media users in response to our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Their stories revealed some clear patterns: certain words, images, and phrases seemed to trigger takedowns, even when posts didn’t come close to violating Meta’s rules. For example, your post linking to information on how people are accessing abortion pills online clearly is not an offer to buy or sell pills, but an algorithm, or a human content reviewer who doesn’t know for sure, might wrongly flag it for violating Meta’s policies on promoting or selling “restricted goods.” That doesn’t mean you’re powerless. For years, people have used “algospeak”—creative spelling, euphemisms, or indirection—to sidestep platform filters. Abortion rights advocates are now forced into similar strategies, even when their speech is perfectly legal. It’s not fair, but it might help you keep your content online. Here are some things we learned from our survey: Practical Tips to Reduce the Risk of Takedowns While traditional social media platforms can help people reach larger audiences, using them also generally means you have to hand over control of what you and others are able to see to the people who run the company. This is the deal that large platforms offer—and while most of us want platforms to moderate some content (even if that moderation is imperfect), current systems of moderation often reflect existing societal power imbalances and impact marginalized voices the most. There are ways companies and governments could better balance the power between users and platforms. In the meantime, there are steps you can take right now to break the hold these platforms have: Images and keywords matter. Posts with pill images, or accounts with “pill” in their names, were flagged often—even when the posts weren’t offering to sell medication. Before posting, consider whether you need to include an image of, or the word “pill,” or whether there’s another way to communicate your message. Clarity beats vagueness. Sayin
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Original reporting: Deeplinks