Curated from Deeplinks — Here’s what matters right now:
This is the second instalment in a ten-part blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. During our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign, we set out to collect and spotlight the growing number of stories from people and organizations that have had abortion-related content removed, suppressed, or flagged by dominant social media platforms. Our survey submissions have revealed some alarming trends, including: if you don’t have a personal or second-degree connection at Meta, your chances of restoring your content or account are likely to drop significantly. Through the survey, we heard from activists, clinics, and researchers whose accounts were suspended or permanently removed for allegedly violating Meta’s policies on promoting or selling “restricted goods,” even when their posts were purely educational or informational. What the submissions also showed is a pattern of overenforcement, lack of transparency, and arbitrary moderation decisions that have specifically affected reproductive health and reproductive justice advocates. When accounts are taken down, appeals can take days, weeks, or even months (if they're even resolved at all, or if users are even given the option to appeal). For organizations and providers, this means losing access to vital communication tools and being cut off from the communities they serve. This is highly damaging since so much of that interaction happens on Meta’s platforms. Yet we saw a disturbing pattern emerge in our survey: on several occasions, accounts are swiftly restored once someone with a connection to Meta intervenes. The Case Studies: An Abortion Clinic The Red River Women's Clinic is an abortion clinic in Moorhead, MN. It was originally located in Fargo, North Dakota, and for many years was the only abortion clinic in North Dakota. In early January, the clinic’s director heard from a patient that she thought they only offered procedural/surgical abortions and not medication abortion. To clarify for other patients, they posted on the clinic’s page that they offered both procedural and medication abortions—attaching an image of a box of mifepristone. When they tried to boost the post, the ad was flagged and their account was suspended. They appealed the decision and initially got the ad approved, yet the page was suspended again shortly after. But this time, multiple appeals and direct emails went unanswered, until they reached out to the Digital Defense Fund, who was able to connect with staff at Meta that stepped in. Only then was their page restored, with Meta noting that their post did not violate the policies but warning that future violations could lead to permanent removal. While this may have been a glitch in Meta’s systems or a misapplication of policy, the suspension of the clinic’s Facebook account was detrimental for them. “We were unable to update our followers about dates/times we were closed, we were unable to share importan
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Original reporting: Deeplinks